Been playing with Loadrunner 9.5 having just completed a two weekend course on the software.

This is quite a big application to learn so I’ve been knocking up scripts like billy-o to see what works and what busts those that don’t run. First off you need a very clean PC. When on a course the PC’s have been setup to specifically run Loadrunner and are therefore quite clean, not so most home PC’s. My PC’s are cluttered with games and heaven knows what internet detritus so the first time I tried running LR on my Vista PC it didn’t work at all.

Another issue I encountered was that LR 9.5 works OK on IE7 but not on IE8 and sooner or later, unless you’re paying close attention, the Windows Upgrade process will install IE8. My way around this was to run VMware where I already had several O/S’s installed over the last year and several of which were still running IE7. The process of installing O/S’s on VM’s is easy enough, provide you have valid O/S install disks and activation codes, but takes time so what I did was create a full clone of the O/S’s with IE7 and installed LR 9.5 on there. The good thing here is that if anything busts then you can just delete the clone and create a new clone from the original VM, which takes about 5 minutes. So, did all that and had a working version of LR on a Vista Ultimate VM running on the host Vista Home O/S. Created some scripts, fired up the controller and ran the scripts with 10 users. It ran like a dog.

VM’s need memory and the PC only had 2 gig and all I was able to give the VM was 1 gig. Not enough, so it was back to the drawing board which really meant running LR on the host O/S with its 2 gig og memory and forgetting about VM’s. This also meant that as IE8 was installed I had to use Firefox or anything but IE8. Created the scripts with Firefox, started the web server and….it wouldn’t start. Got a socket (80) already in use message. That turned out to be used by my Orb client which is streaming software that allows me to remotely access digital music, movies, pictures, webcams and TV from my iPhone. Stopped the Orb client and the web server started.

My Vista PC was now going to act as both the client and server when I ran the LR scripts which is not how LR would normally be used. I thought I’d try and see how many concurrent scripts could be run so I started with 10 and then 100 users and they worked OK. Then I tried 1,000 users with each user starting every 5 seconds and then when all 1,000 users had started leaving the script running for 1 minute. Well that was the plan. That was way too pushy as there were failed transactions after about 25 users were running and then it got worse as most users failed completely. The final stats were that 85 users were running but also having failed transactions and about 350 users failed to even initialise let alone login successfully and finally the web server crashed though LR still gamely continued, to not much use.

Next test will be 200 users but each starting every minute and then I should do something more serious like seeing if I can get manual correlation working. Shame there isn’t a book on Loadrunner.

Phoned the agent about the online test I took the other day and he said that two out of four of us passed the online exam though the official response from the company who set it was still forthcoming.

The agent was so confident that I had done OK and was so keen to find out what I had written eventually I sent him my answer to the virtual machine question which he loved. When he had found out that I’d made a copy of all the questions and my answers he wanted the lot but if I did that I have a feeling that somehow they’d get into the wild for all and sundry to use and that’s not to my advantage.

Apparently this was the second time this company had tried recruiting someone. The first time 17 people took the test and only one passed and he then failed the interview. The 16 that failed all came from Asia and most hadn’t even finished the test, they just left a load of questions blank. The agent said that all of them had great resume’s with every bit of sexy software experience going. So why did they have such trouble with the test? Dunno.

By last Friday I still hadn’t heard any official feedback from the company and I told the agent that I thought it was fading away but no he had a real good feeling about it. Finally yesterday he phoned to say that though he’d got negative feedback from the company on the two, out of four, of us that had failed the test the company had a big software release coming up and the guy didn’t have time to give any feedback for the two of us who had passed the test and that if the agent hadn’t heard back in three to four days then assume that we hadn’t been selected. I think I can safely assume that we will not be hearing back from that lot. The poor old agent was a bit surprised by this as the company had been very keen on employing someone for the last 3 months and finally when they found someone they ran away.

I suppose maybe us two (Smartasses. Ed) may have scared them off a bit with our exam results. Whatever, in a couple of weeks they’ll be back in the market for the same people and they won’t be able to use that agency as they have already found suitable candidates. The company will have to use a different agency and hope that us two don’t apply. If I mentioned this to the agency he’d probably get a little irritated and eventually blame us for losing him business and he’d be right.

Thinking about doing some Loadrunner stuff….

I was given a demo of a Loadrunner type application today and it looked quite useful and very powerful

Apparently you don’t need to do any coding at all, but I find that hard to believe. All you have to do is point it at a URL and get testing. I asked the guy giving the demo how many virtual users it could simulate, and he said there was no limit. That got me thinking. I asked him so you could just point it at Amazon.com, simulate a couple of 100 million users, dragging Amazon down to its knees, via what it would think was a denial of service attack and you would end up in jail. The guy responded that when his company used it in anger they did so with the express permission of the web sites company and usually in the middle of the night when it wouldn’t cause to much grief (Not an international company then? He-he. Ed). Well that’s fine but if it did get into the wrong hands and those hands could hide their IP address, jeez doesn’t bear thinking about.

There is a demo version that you can download and run and it’s limited to about five users so I might try that and see just how little code I really do have to write to automate buying something from Amazon. No that’s not a good idea as I might end up buying something I don’t want or even worse multiple copies of something I don’t want. Maybe I’ll try something really easy first.

I did try downloading it onto Vista but needless to say there isn’t a Vista version available.