LoadRunner : A Performance testing tool

LoadRunner is one of the biggest name in the performance testing world. LoadRunner has a variety of protocol support which covers nearly all types of the software platform.
LoadRunner is developed by Mercury in 1999 and acquired by HPE in 2006 and named as HP LoadRunner. Later on, after the merger of Micro Focus with HPE gave it a new name called Micro Focus LoadRunner.

Functioning of LoadRunner

LoadRunner works on the concept of recording and replaying the user activities and generating the desired load on the server. It simply simulates the real world user’s actions and helps to identify the performance of the software application or system by generating virtual load.

The main steps include:

• Recording/Scripting : To capture the user action into a script. These scripts are run by generating virtual users.
• Test Execution : Replaying the script along with virtual load to simulate the real-world situation in the test environment.
• Result Analysis : To provide accurate result in terms of load handling capacity and responsiveness of the application. the Analysis tool generates the report (in pdf, HTML, excel etc. format) which concludes the test result.

LoadRunner Components

Micro Focus LoadRunner has the following components:

1. Virtual User Generator or VuGen : It records end-user business processes and creates an automated test script in the form of programming language. The generated script is called as VuGen Script or Test Script.
2. Load Generators : These are machines which generate the virtual load as per the requirement. During test execution, the Controller distributes each Vuser in the scenario to a load generator. Load generator is also used to simulates the geographical location of the users.
3. Controller : It organizes, drives, manages, and monitors the load test. A controller is also used for workload modelling. Workload Modelling involves the creation of a test scenario as per NFR (Non-Functional Requirement).
4. Agent : The LoadRunner agent sets-up a communication between the Controller and the Load Generator.
5. Analysis : It helps to view, dissect and compare the results of the load tests. Analysis tool displays the result graphs and statistics to validate the test result against the defined NFRs (Non-functional requirement) and to find out the bottleneck (performance bugs). The analysis tool also generates a report based on the test result.

Performance Testing Roadmap

Performance Testing Roadmap can be broadly divided into 5 steps:

• Planning for Load Test
• Create VUGen Scripts
• Scenario Creation
• Scenario Execution
• Results Analysis (followed by system tweaking)

Why to choose LoadRunner?

There are many reasons to choose Microfocus LoadRunner as a Performance Testing tool:

1. LoadRunner has a simple and interactive user interface.
2. It removes the drawbacks of manual performance testing with its user-friendly components.
3. LoadRunner limits the requirement of excess hardware. Since there are no physical users so a single Load Generator machine can generate multiple user load and reduces the requirement of hardware or physical machines.
4. Easy correlation method (to handle the dynamic values coming from the server). Also, intelligent auto-correlation feature.
5. Supports mobile and cloud performance testing.
6. The flexibility of the controller helps to create the user load test of any pattern.
7. Live graphs and statistics of client-side performance metric during the test.
8. LoadRunner also supports to monitor the network and server resources to identify the bottleneck.
9. A wide variety of graphs helps in result analysis.
10. Option to generate the reports in multiple formats.

To learn more about LoadRunner you can also visit:
https://www.perfmatrix.com/micro-focus-loadrunner-tutorial/