Enterprise PHP: WAPT, Web Application Load, Stress and Performance Testing : Mobile Edition

Published on 2006-12-09 21:39:11

WAPT interface

WAPT interface is very well designed so you can understand easily from where to start at first test. You can find yourself very familiar with the application thanks to its Getting started guide which explain the concept of WAPT and how to use it. I have find everything inside it !

Creating Scenario

To get started you should create a test scenario that define the different test conditions such users and duration. Testing scenarios depend on your testing objectives :

Capacity/Overall Performance

Performance Characteristics

Stress Capabilities

Reliability/Endurance

Real User Experience/Background Testing

Scalability/Benchmarking

Each case is explained in the application and you can have more options to change for each objective to fit with your testing needs.

Creating Profiles

After you have created your scenario, you can create your different profiles based on which you simulate the user sessions. Every profile have its own properties from name, iterations, user think time, in addition to advanced properties such simulated user connection speed, load images, keep alive, ignore errors, authentication, IP spoofing, cookies, headers ...

Then you start recording the browsing scenario of the profile, and for better real life simulation, virtual user sessions are divided into three different parts and each part represents a set of user actions. That's why you'll find in the application initial actions, main actions and final actions, and WAPT allow you also to drag and drop requests between the different situations.

Tests and Results

After preparing your tests scenarios you can simply start running your tests and exploring results. Intermediate results are available during runtime and final results will be available at the end of the test run.

You can explore results directly from the application or export html only, images only or both formats. You can find a large sets of reports depending on your testing objectives which include lot of information from the very basic to the very advanced performance reports.

And of course a graph will be much better to understand the results, and you can find the overall performance, the errors, the average bandwidth and the average response time.

Results could be also exported to CSV to create your custom graphs and explore with more details the different failure or bottlenecks of your web applications.

Conclusion

Overall, WAPT is a best of in its category, to add it to your toolbox. It fit very well with small, medium and large projects, anytime you want to perform advanced tests to your applications. HTTP requests can include parameters that are specific for each user, which make it very flexible to test dynamic web applications, in addition to the possibility to test HTTPS/SSL content. The only issue I have found is that WAPT currently don't support XMLHTTPRequest for AJAX based applications.

WAPT is available from $350 per license to $210, you can read more about the software pricing

more information and download : http://www.loadtestingtool.com/

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