Loadrunner misses extra resources

Recently, I’ve encountered an issue with an AUT where it crashes VUgen during the generation stage of a recording session. Now I’m a big fan of record-edit-playback. I find the recording and generation logs hugely useful and I find that recording is the easiest and quickest way to get a view of the application.
I call it record-edit-playback because the recording isn’t enough on it’s own for me to use as a performing performance test. But as a foundation, it’s fine. And they rarely playback immediately in any case. Session ID’s are designed to prevent that kind of thing.

The logs in particular are great for helping you find and construct parameter-capturing code for session ids, and identifying user variables that you may want to emulate.

My process for recording is very simple though I haven’t documented it here before so I will now:

  • Record the script once
  • Save it as Scriptname_DATE_RAW
  • Save it again as Scriptname_DATE_WIP (work in progress).

That means you can always roll back if you need to. The WIP copy is the working document until it’s finished when it becomes Scriptname_DATE_FINAL. At that point I hive it off to the controller as well as my local repository. I don’t like cluttering up the controller with WIP versions. And I don’t like the controller pulling scripts across the network, I just think it’s poor practice.

But I digress.

As a solution to the fact I couldn’t record the script, I used Fiddler as a proxy to capture the urls I visited when manually executing the script in Firefox. Over on the DevDiary there’s an article about this, but the point I wanted to make was this. Loadrunner doesn’t capture everything that’s on a page. Fiddler output was about 40 lines for the homepage, a Loadrunner visit to just the homepage was capturing 10 lines of resources (I managed to get LR to do that before it died again).

It seems that if a resource (for example a .css) contains sub-resources Fiddler will see that but Loadrunner won’t. I don’t know if that is by accident or design. I don’t know if it’s implied that LR is geettng them but not explicit in the results and the logs. I intend to find out in due course but it makes me wonder how I’ve not seen this before in 15 years of performance testing. Maybe it’s specific to this project, I could believe that, we are uniquely complicated from what I’ve seen. But what if it’s not. How many issues could have been avoided if I’d seen a bottleneck on one of those resources – maybe an underperforming java-script for example? It’s all academic now anyway but it’s certainly something I’ll look out for in the future. And as an aside, maybe Loadrunners recording engine isn’t as good as I’ve always thought it to be? Interesting times. In Belgium…

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