What is HP LoadRunner Testing Tool? Architecture, Components

Details

What is LoadRunner?

LoadRunner is a Performance Testing tool which was pioneered by Mercury in 1999. LoadRunner was later acquired by HPE in 2006. In 2016, LoadRunner was acquired by MicroFocus.

LoadRunner supports various development tools, technologies and communication protocols. In fact, this is the only tool in market which supports such a large number of protocols to conduct Performance Testing. Performance Test Results produced by LoadRunner software are used as a benchmark against other tools

In this tutorial, you will learn-

Why LoadRunner?

LoadRunner is not only pioneer tool in Performance Testing, but it is still a market leader in the Performance Testing paradigm. In a recent assessment, LoadRunner has about 85% market share in Performance Testing industry.

 

Introduction to HP LoadRunner and its Architecture

Broadly, LoadRunner tool supports RIA (Rich Internet Applications), Web 2.0 (HTTP/HTML, Ajax, Flex and Silverlight etc.), Mobile, SAP, Oracle, MS SQL Server, Citrix, RTE, Mail and above all, Windows Socket. There is no competitor tool in the market which could offer such wide variety of protocols vested in a single tool.

Introduction to HP LoadRunner and its Architecture

What is more convincing to pick LoadRunner in software testing is the credibility of this tool. LoadRunner tool has long established a reputation as often you will find clients cross verifying your performance benchmarks using LoadRunner. You'll find relief if you're already using LoadRunner for your performance testing needs.

LoadRunner software is tightly integrated with other HP Tools like Unified Functional Test (QTP) & ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) with empowers you to perform your end to end Testing Processes. 

LoadRunner works on a principal of simulating Virtual Users on the subject application. These Virtual Users also termed as VUsers, replicate client's requests and expect a corresponding response to passing a transaction.

Taking Analogy from our Amazon Example, the output of this component will be

Analysis:

Once Load scenarios have been executed, the role of "Analysis" components of LoadRunner comes in.

During the execution, Controller creates a dump of results in raw form & contains information like, which version of LoadRunner created this results dump and what were configurations.

All the errors and exceptions are logged in a Microsoft access database, named, output.mdb. The "Analysis" component reads this database file to perform various types of analysis and generates graphs.

These graphs show various trends to understand the reasoning behind errors and failure under load; thus help to figure whether optimization is required in SUL, Server (e.g. JBoss, Oracle) or infrastructure.

Below is an example where bandwidth could be creating a bottleneck. Let's say Web server has 1GBps capacity whereas the data traffic exceeds this capacity causing subsequent users to suffer. To determine system caters to such needs, Performance Engineer needs to analyze application behavior with an abnormal load. Below is a graph LoadRunner generates to elicit bandwidth.

Introduction to HP LoadRunner and its Architecture

Performance Testing Roadmap: Detailed Steps

Performance Testing Roadmap can be broadly divided into 5 steps:

Now that you've LoadRunner installed, let's understand the steps involved in the process one by one.

Introduction to HP LoadRunner and its Architecture

Steps involved in Performance Testing process

Planning for the Load Test

Planning for Performance Testing is different from planning a SIT (System Integration Testing) or UAT (User Acceptance Testing). Planning can be further divided into small stages as described below:

Assemble Your Team

Introduction to HP LoadRunner and its Architecture

When getting started with LoadRunner Testing, it is best to document who will be participating in the activity from each team involved during the process.

Project Manager:

Nominate the project manager who will own this activity and serve as point person for escalation.

Function Expert/ Business Analyst:

Provide Usage Analysis of SUL & provides expertise on business functionality of website/SUL

Performance Testing Expert:

Creates the automated performance tests and executes load scenarios

System Architect:

Provides blueprint of the SUL

Web Developer and SME:

System Administrator:

Outline applications and Business Processes involved:

Successful Load Testing requires that you plan to carry out certain business process. A Business Process consists of clearly defined steps in compliance with desired business transactions - so as to accomplish your load testing objectives.

A requirements metric can be prepared to elicit user load on the system. Below is an example of an attendance system in a company:

Introduction to HP LoadRunner and its Architecture

In the above example, the figures mention the number of users connected to the application (SUL) at given hour. We can extract the maximum number of users connected to a business process at any hour of the day which is calculated in the rightmost columns.

Similarly, we can conclude the total number of users connected to the application (SUL) at any hour of the day. This is calculated in the last row.

The above 2 facts combined give us the total number of users with which we need to test the system for performance.

Define Test Data Management Procedures

Statistics and observations drawn from Performance Testing are greatly influenced by numerous factors as briefed earlier. It is of critical significance to prepare Test Data for Performance Testing. Sometimes, a particular business process consumes a data set and produces a different data set. Take below example:

In this situation, User B need to have 200 contracts 'created' in the system. Besides, user C needs 150 contracts as "approved" in order to simulate a load of 150 users.

This implicitly means that you must create at least 200+150= 350 contracts.

After that, approve 150 contracts to serve as Test data for User C - the remaining 200 contracts will serve as Test Data for User B.

Outline Monitors

Speculate each and every factor which could possibly affect the performance of a system. For example, having reduced hardware will have potential impact on the SUL(System Under Load) performance.

Enlist all factors and set up monitors so you can gauge them. Here are few examples:

Create VUGen Scripts

Next step after planning is to create VUser scripts.

Scenario Creation

Next step is to create your Load Scenario

Scenario Execution

Scenario execution is where you emulate user load on the server by instructing multiple VUsers to perform tasks simultaneously.

You can set the level of a load by increasing and decreasing the number of VUsers that perform tasks at the same time.

This execution may result in the server to go under stress and behave abnormally. This is the very purpose of the performance Testing. The results drawn are then used for detailed analysis and root cause identification.

Results Analysis (followed by system tweaking)

During scenario execution, LoadRunner records the performance of the application under different loads. The statistics drawn from test execution are saved and details analysis is performed. The 'HP Analysis' tool generates various graphs which help in identifying the root causes behind a lag of system performance, as well as a system failure.

Some of the graphs obtained include:

 

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