bish.co.uk – Page 45 – Musings of a performance tester

Google’s “Let’s make the web faster” initiative

Google has launched a new initiative to encourage people to develop faster, more efficient web applications.

To do this, they have published tools for download (like Fiddler and HTTP Watch) on their website. They have also written articles which explain GZIP compression, prefetching, reducing HTML size and image sizes etc. These may all be of interest to performance testers as well as Google’s target audience (developers) so their site is well worth a read if you find yourself at a loose end.

http://code.google.com/speed – The main website

http://code.google.com/speed/articles/ – Articles describing different performance improving technologies / techniques

http://code.google.com/speed/downloads.html – Downloads of useful tools which can help developers to improve web performance.

Prevent a LoadRunner script from running between two times

Some scripts cannot be run between certain times, this is especially the case when we are running long duration tests or preparing test data by data-seeding overnight.

In these cases it may be useful to specify times when you don’t want a script to run, for example you might want to schedule a script so that it can’t run when backups or system restarts are taking place.

The attached script contains an example of a function (CheckExclusionTime) which can prevent a script from running between certain times. The script is made more complicated by the fact that you might want to prevent a script from running between 23:50 one day and 00:15 the next day. To achieve the desired result it is necessary to convert any time into an integer value representing the number of minutes which have passed from 00:00 on Monday until the current time and then calculating if the current time falls within the excluded period.

The integers 1 through to 7 represent the days Monday through to Sunday.

Other integers are used to represent the exclusion start time and exclusion end time.

Sample LoadRunner scripts, demonstrating LOOPs

I have found numerous occasions where I need to use a LOOP within a LoadRunner script to repeatedly perform an action. There are several ways that LOOPs can be used to repeat actions for either a specified number of times or until a particular occurrence is observed.

This script includes an example of FOR, WHILE and DO LOOPs.

Click here to download the script.
LoopExample.zip