Load Testing Web Services With Test Studio

Many web sites make use of Web services, either in-house services or those from a third party.  Web services perform tasks common across many applications, such as stock market tickers, weather reports, and news feeds.

If the Web service is in-house, testers have to determine if it meets the required performance and load characteristics.  If the service is provided by a third party, you want to make sure that it is meeting your Service Level Agreement regarding the number of simultaneous users and response times.  Test Studio will have the ability to help you determine this.

Let’s take a look at how you do this in the upcoming Test Studio 2013 R2.  When you capture a session for playback, in addition to the browser choices you also get options to capture from local or remote devices (more on the remote devices in a future post).  Selecting the local device records all HTTP traffic to and from your computer.  You then go to the site you want to test, and make sure that you capture traffic coming from its Web services.

After you finish recording and saving that traffic, you probably want to filter it in order to focus on only the Web services of interest.  That means getting rid of traffic to the main website, ad servers, and traffic from other sites.  Once you open the recording, click on the funnel icon just above the captured traffic.  You’re presented with a list of URLs that you can select to include in the actual test; all other URL traffic will be filtered out.

Then you determine how many simultaneous users you want to test with, go ahead and run the load test, and analyze the results.

Of course, you can also do anything else that is possible with normal load tests, including building in “think times” and applying dynamic targets.  If the service is in-house, you can also look at Perfmon counters on the server to examine the load in more detail.  Test Studio 2013 R2 will be available on December 11, so be sure and take a look at this great new feature.

Peter Varhol

About the author

Peter Varhol

Peter Varhol is an Evangelist for Telerik’s TestStudio. He’s been a software developer and software product manager, technology journalist, and university professor among the many roles in his past, and believes that his best talent is explaining concepts and practices to others. He’s on Twitter at @pvarhol.