Loadrunner Developer
Micro focus recently released Loadrunner Developer. It's main focus is to performance test Websocket and the HTTP transport layer. It is ideal for the latest web technologies such as HTTP/s, HTTP2 and Websockets and uses a simple JavaScript SDK.
Loadrunner Developer is free to download from Micro focus and it available on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Script creation can be achieved in a number of ways including recording or via HAR file offline generation.
In this example we will create a HAR file from Google Chrome Developer Tools.
Create HAR file
Open Google Chrome.
Click CTRL + Shift + I to open Developer Tools
Ensure that “Preserve log” and “Disable cache” are both checked.
Navigate to martkos-it.co.uk
Then click on the Blog link.
Click on the first blog article.
Now right-click on the developer tools window over the recorded steps and “Save all as HAR with content” and create the HAR file.
Create Offline Script from HAR file
Once we have a HAR file we can use the Loadrunner Developer Offline Generator to convert it into a script with the following command:-
OfflineGenerator -mode=har -level=pages martkos-it.co.uk.har scripts/martkosit/
Under the scripts/martkosit/ folder there will be a number of files including “main.js” which contains the converted HAR contents.
The file(s) in this instance are displayed in Microsoft Visual Studio Code. A template can be downloaded from Micro focus for Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
The script is similar to those created in Micro focus VUGen with the requests being wrapped inside load.WebRequest. The request contains the target url and resources. Filters can be used to ensure only the required components are generated.
Since the file contains a RAW recording of the network traffic, it will need to be modified. Correlation, parameterization and error checking well need to be added into the script to ready it for execution.
Full documentation can be found on Micro Focus Loadrunner Developer help pages.
YML Files
To control the run time settings and scenario used in test execution Loadrunner Developer uses YML files. They are called rts.yml and scenario.yml. Both files can be modified to meet the requirements of the test.
WebDev CLI (Execution)
Test execution can be undertaken by using the WebDev command (the script can also be executed by Loadrunner Controller). This uses the command line interface. Again, documentation for the full DevWeb options exist on the Micro Focus website.
We are able to execute a load test by running the following command. This will use the aforementioned YML files to determine the test.
DevWeb -mode=load scripts/martkosit/
On completion - an execution finished date/time stamp is returned and the test results are written to the scripts/martkosit/results/ directory. The results directory contains logs, snapshots and a devWebDB.db SQLite database file.
Summary
Loadrunner Developer is designed to introduce developers to performance testing. Integrating it across IDEs, it’s ability to integrate with tools such as Grafana, the clear syntax and documentation will appeal to many.
It will be interesting to see where Micro focus take this new application in the future.