Basic Actions

WAPT Pro is a load and stress testing tool that provides you with an easy to use, consistent and cost-effective way of testing web sites and intranet applications with web interface. Using WAPT Pro, you can test and analyze performance characteristics and bottlenecks of a web site under various load conditions.

WAPT Pro emulates the activity of human users with the help of virtual users. Each virtual user emulates the actions of a single real user. A test run can contain hundreds or even thousands of virtual users to let you emulate the load experienced by a web site when the corresponding number of real users browses it.

WAPT Pro consists of 2 components: WAPT Pro Workplace and Load Agent. The workplace component provides the user interface for test engineers. It is used to design test scenarios, launch and control test execution, and analyze the results. Load Agents can be installed on one or several servers to emulate user activity and produce the test load. All agents are controlled from the system running WAPT Pro Workplace.

You can install Load Agent on your local computer, on any computer in the Local Area Network, or on a remote server anywhere in the Internet. Agents are installed as Windows services, so you will not need to launch them each time you want to perform testing. The communication between Load Agents and the workplace component is done over TCP/IP.

With WAPT Pro you can distribute the test load between several computers and perform a distributed test run. You can use as many servers running Load Agents in your tests as you need. This way you can emulate almost any number of simultaneously acting virtual users.

To perform a test, you should create a test scenario. WAPT Pro test scenario defines parameters of test run: the number of virtual users, test duration, date and time when the test will be started, user simulation options and the list of included user profiles.

User profiles describe the behaviour of virtual users. You can create as many profiles as you need. This will allow you to emulate a real workload on a tested server. For each user profile, you should specify web pages that will be requested (visited). This can be done by recording the real activity in WAPT Pro Recorder. WAPT Pro records pages as you navigate through a web site.

To add more reality to your tests, you can specify a number of properties for each user profile, properties for individual pages and add dynamically changing data to the test. You can also add operators to the sequence of recorded requests to manage the behaviour of virtual users.

After you have created your test scenario, included user profiles to it, recorded the sequence of requests for each user profile and specified the list of agents that will emulate user load, you can start the test. Note that you should specify at least one Load Agent to start the test.

When WAPT Pro finishes the test, it displays the results of test run. Graphs and reports will give you the summary and detailed information on web site performance under specified load conditions. You can also view intermediate results at run-time while your test is being executed.

On test completion, you will see a web browser window with the generated HTML Report. This report enables viewing test run results just from a web browser. Also you can save test run results in Microsoft® Excel compatible format.

The interface of WAPT Pro is easy to use. Navigation Pane will help you navigate between different program views. Root folders of the Navigation Pane display a short description of elements this folder contains.

Description of Selected Features

Distributed load generation
The resources of a single workstation can be insufficient to create a load required to test a web application running on a powerful server. That is why WAPT Pro can use several computers for load generation. For this purpose a special service called Load Agent should be installed on each system. The whole testing environment is managed from a different computer running WAPT Pro Workplace component. It provides a convenient user interface for test engineers. They can use it to design test scenarios, launch and control test execution in real time, and analyze the results.

Remote test management
WAPT Pro allows running tests on a remote computer anywhere in the Internet. You can find a server with a superior hardware configuration and install the Load Agent on it. Then you will be able to run tests on that server from your local machine. You can let many test engineers connect to that server from their workstations to perform the testing. They can even run their tests concurrently, provided that the performance of the server is sufficient to handle this.

Server Performance Monitoring
WAPT Pro can measure various parameters of web server performance during the test, such as CPU, RAM, HDD utilization and network usage. It can also read various parameters of the database performance, which is essential for web applications that include databases. This data is included in the test results, so you can see how these parameters were changing during the test.

Accurate simulation of real user activity
WAPT Pro uses a number of techniques to create natural simulation of load existing in real life. This approach is much more efficient than producing high load by making many identical requests to the server. Our goal is to create a simulation of many different users coming from different IP addresses, each with his own cookies, input data for various page forms, name and password, connection speed and his own specific path through the site. WAPT Pro can even simulate random time between user clicks to make each virtual user as similar as possible to a human user.

Different types of users in one test
If you want to simulate thousands users, you do not need to specify behavior separately for each of them. Practice shows that usually site visitors can be divided into the certain types. This approach is used in WAPT Pro. You specify behavior for each type of users and add to the test as many users of each type as you need.
For example, all users of an online shop can be divided into those who browse through the catalog and visitors brought to the certain page of the site by a marketing campaign to buy some specific items. Each type of users has specific path through the site and other parameters. For each type you create a separate profile where you specify all this data. In the test you can use as many virtual users of each type as you want. You can create more profiles to represent users browsing different areas of the site or making some specific purchases. This will make your test more accurate.

Testing of essentially dynamic content
HTTP requests can include parameters that are specific for each user. The values of such parameters can even be different for different users of the same type and can change during one session. For example, the server can send a session variable in the reply to the first request from a new user. This variable is added to the subsequent requests from that user to identify him. You can specify how to determine and use such changing parameters.

Flexible load level definition
You can either choose a constant load level for the whole test time, or increase the load after the specified time intervals during the test, or periodically increase/decrease the number of users by introducing 2 phases changing one another: one with a low load level and another with a high load level. You also specify the duration of test run and the number of virtual users for each profile. Overall load significantly depends on the type of users, so you can change it by introducing new types of users making them "slow" or "fast".

Automatic Parameterization of Requests
WAPT Pro can automatically search for dynamic data during recording. There are 2 ways of search for dynamic data in WAPT Pro.
1. Search for strings between specified boundaries (between some text strings on the left and on the right).
2. Extract to variables values of hidden fields in HTML forms.
If WAPT Pro finds dynamic values in responses during recording, it automatically creates the corresponding variables. Variables are further used to calculate values of parameters in subsequent requests and also correct URL paths of subsequent requests depending on page content. This feature considerably simplifies the design of tests for pages with dynamic content.

Testing of HTTPS/SSL content
WAPT Pro supports testing web sites and applications secured by SSL. Specify the necessary options on the HTTPS tab of program settings, then enable the HTTPS option in the properties of requests, and you will be able to work with HTTPS sites just like you do with any other ones.

Descriptive test reports and graphs
WAPT Pro represents test results in the form of descriptive reports and graphs. They are available even during the test, so you can monitor the key parameters of web application performance on the fly and see how your site responds to the increasing load volume. Summary reports and graphs are useful to determine the presence of any problems in overall performance. Then you can check more detailed reports for separate user profiles and pages to find specific bottlenecks. Besides, WAPT Pro generates the report in HTML format, so you can easily share test results with your colleagues. You can also save test results in Microsoft® Excel compatible format. During the test, WAPT Pro collects complete test data including server replies to each request. You can use this information to research site behavior in all details.