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Web Application Stress Tool Examples

The Web Application Stress Tool contains powerful features that make creating scripts and testing Web sites easier. Here are some examples of things you can do:

• Record the clicks in your browser. The Web Application Stress Tool captures your browser activity and stores this information in a script. This makes it easy to create realistic user activity.
• Create a new script. To do so, select the files located on your Web server by using the Content Tree editor. This allows you to quickly create a script that can hit every page on your Web site, without requiring you to manually type each URL in the Script editor.
• Create a script from an Internet Information Services (IIS) log file; IIS records site usage within this file. If your site is already deployed on the Internet, or on an Intranet, IIS is collecting useful data for you. The format and contents of these log files vary based on how you have configured IIS. The Web Application Stress Tool can read the most common formats and will allow you to create a script directly from this data, thus producing realistic scripts. This method of script creation is useful for troubleshooting problems on a live site.
• Design a script that contains random or sequential name-value pairs that are passed to an online form. The Web Application Stress Tool contains the Querystring editor; this parses both Active Server Pages (ASP) and HTML forms to let you specify the name-value pairs.

  In a script, if the same name-value pairs were passed with every request for this page, the test would not be very realistic. Consequently, the Web Application Stress Tool provides an interface that automatically selects a different "FirstName", "LastName", and "Amount" value for every request. This ensures a realistic way to test the performance and stability of the forms on your Web site.

• Create some users and then request pages that create cookies. When a Web page passes a cookie value, the Web Application Stress Tool assigns that cookie to a user. You can modify the cookie value for each user. These same users are then used to stress test the Web site, passing the cookie with each request. This generates a realistic stress scenario, especially on Web sites that contain heavy user interaction and personalization.
• Determine the bottleneck and maximum requests per second by increasing the number of threads in a stress test. This type of testing provides valuable feedback on how your Web site will perform in the real world.
• Adjust the bandwidth throttling to obtain performance statistics on your site at varying bandwidths. For example, you can run a test that simulates a 56 kilobits per second (Kbps) modem and look at the report data to see how long a user will need to wait before a page renders on the client.
• Export the report values to Microsoft® Excel and create charts filled with critical data that demonstrate the performance and stability of your Web application.