A Guide to JMeter Preprocessors and Postprocessors

When building your JMeter test, samplers provide the core functionality. They are responsible for sending the actual HTTP requests and handling those responses. However, as your test becomes more complex and sophisticated, it may be desirable to add conditional logic to your requests. Furthermore, you may wish to dynamically process the inputs and outputs to these. JMeter provides this functionality though a host of preprocessors and postprocessors. This brief post will serve as a guide toRead More →

Schedule a load test

Once some users have written their load tests, they want to schedule a load test to run at a particular time or as part of a continuous integration build process. Or even run a recurring test at the same time on a schedule.  The RedLine13 API makes this all possible. A Practical Example In a previous post we showed how to get started using the RedLine13 API. Building upon this, you can use your scripting languageRead More →

IoT load testing

Eldad Uzman, Automation Architect at Merck, is the guest author on IoT load testing. You can read more from Eldad at Medium. Abstract In this article, I’ll discuss some of the challenges of load testing in the IoT world, and try to provide some practical solutions to these problems based on my personal experience. What is IoT? The internet-of-things refers to connecting physical devices such as sensors or computational devices to the internet. It is oftenRead More →

Troubleshooting Common Issues with Selenium Tests on RedLine13

Many RedLine13 customers have a need for full-browser testing. This is something we support with Selenium WebDriver. In this brief post we will cover common issues encountered with Selenium WebDriver tests and when scaling load testing on RedLine13. Test Never Completes Occasionally we encounter a Selenium WebDriver test that otherwise appears to run as expected, however never completes. One possible explanation is a simple one, where the driver.quit() statement is omitted. const main = () =>Read More →

Extracting Metadata from Load Generator Instances

RedLine13 load generator instances are backed by AWS EC2 instances. AWS exposes a special locally-addressable endpoint that returns metadata about that instance. Using this, you can ascertain such things as the region in which your instance resides, private and public addresses, and instance tags amongst other useful data points. A specific example of where this would be useful is where you have defined a load test to run in multiple regions, with a number of EC2-backedRead More →

Pitfalls of Selenium Load Testing

Tests created with Selenium WebDriver replicate the user experience from the perspective of the UI.  It can be thought of as a top-down approach whereby it accurately replicates the behavior of an end user. Running through a browser instance such as Chrome or Firefox, the test process itself interacts with the actual user interface elements of a target test application. This is in contrast to many other testing frameworks.  One of the most popular is JMeter,Read More →

Selenium Basics for Load Testing

We have several examples available to help you get started with Selenium WebDriver testing on RedLine13. In this brief post, we’ll go about constructing a Selenium script from scratch. We will also review the basic necessities and also common pitfalls when deploying on RedLine13. Selenium supports several languages for scripting, with JavaScript being a popular choice. The first line in our script should be instantiating the redline WebDriver instance: const redline = require(‘redline13-webdriver’); We will wantRead More →

RedLine13 Basic vs Premium

What are the similarities and differences between a RedLine13 Basic vs Premium subscription? Similarities and Differences There are some key similarities with Basic and Premium. Both subscriptions have no limits on the number of tests you run. They have no limits on the duration of your tests. Both have real-time graphs, Jenkins integration and API access. But there are some differences between RedLine13 Basic vs Premium. Team Support A Basic subscription is for a single user.Read More →

How to Run a Multi-Region Test

RedLine13 integrates with AWS to handle the spin up, management, and termination of your load generator servers without you ever having to worry about any of those details.  We also support starting load generators from any AWS region.  This is useful for when you want to simulate traffic which originates from geographically diverse sources.  In this brief post, we will show you how to run a multi-region test to achieve this. This is available in ourRead More →

JMeter Custom Thread Groups

With any JMeter test, thread groups constitute the basic container for test plan requests and other elements. The simplicity of the basic thread group is such that with enough ingenuity anything is possible. Through clever use of scripting, timing, and logic elements it is possible to simulate any user behavior. However, for simulating complex traffic patterns there is an easier way. One of the most useful plugins for JMeter comes as the “Custom Thread Groups” collection.Read More →