Altentee » Performance & Test Automation Experts

How to spoof Google Analytics traffic with JMeter

Recently a client asked Altentee to generate some load against their subscription to Google Analytics (GA). Calls to GA and other 3rd party monitoring tools are typically requests we blacklist or consider out of scope. So it was unusual to think the other way around, how would you performance test GA?

The solution as it turns [...]

Authenticating Proxy with Webdriver and Watir

A question came up on stack overflow about how to route Watir through an authenticating proxy within your script.

The problem here is that you cannot auto authenticate to a proxy server using Chrome –proxy-server=my.proxy.com:3128 or using Firefox.

Chrome will always prompt you for a user name and password on an authenticating proxy when it starts up [...]

Regex in BrowserMob Scripts

If you’re using an RBU or VU you may need to extract content from the previous response. For example, enumerate a link to a PDF file for subsequent download.

The BrowserMob interface has a handy findRegexMatches method you can call as follows:

var link = browserMob.findRegexMatches(selenium.getHtmlSource(), 'href="(.+?pdf)"'); browserMob.beginStep("16_download_content"); browser.get(link[0], 200); browserMob.endStep();

It takes a string input and [...]

Emulating Think Time and Pacing with BrowserMob

If you come from the commercial toolset mindset, you might be interested in how we achieve think time and pacing when using alternatives such as BrowserMob.

Think Time Think time, is normally defined as the amount of time a virtual user ‘thinks’ between individual steps within a transaction. This time is usually excluded from response time measurements [...]

Instant Website Tests with BrowserMob

Can you afford a slow landing page?

Google AdWords page quality criteria are many, a prominent check being your landing page load time. A slow load time can lead to a lower quality score.

Make sure you’re not wasting effort on advertising campaigns. Altentee uses BrowserMob to help check website performance for clients from multiple locations. You [...]

Securing MySQL Passwords

There’s been a bit of buzz lately where MySQL databases have been compromised and user passwords being stored in plain text. Bad fu. It’s pretty simple to encrypt passwords in MySQL, here’s how you do it.

I’m using MySQL’s AES which is better than older standards. Basically 128 bit key encryption …

To begin, let’s create a [...]

Dynamic Data from JMeter JDBC Requests

A common requirement when load testing is to populate subsequent requests with dynamic data from previous requests. If you’re thinking about using a database to store static test data, such as usernames, paswords, credit card numbers etc then read on to find out how to extract this data at runtime and populate JMeter variables.

In this [...]

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger [and Cheaper!]

No, not the song but my adage for 2010 in my approach to performance testing in general. Readers of my old blog 90kts.com may have noticed the recent change to altentee.com. In 2009 I helped setup a boutique testing company called Altentee Pty Ltd. Read on for a quick advertisement about this new initiative …

We’re [...]

Improved EBS snapshots on Amazon EC2

So I’ve been working on a system where the MySQL instance on EC2 sporadically locks up (mysqld is zombied) during a snapshot process =)

Essentially the EC2 snapshot is triggered like this:

system("xfs_freeze -f /vol") and die; system("ec2-create-snapshot $vol -K $key -C $crt ") and die; system("xfs_freeze -u /vol") and die;

This method is based on advice from here

Notice I [...]

My Favourite SCiTE settings …

Well the subject goes without saying. I’ve been working on WinXP again lately and when I’m not around my favourite text editor on the mac (TextMate) I opt for SCiTE on windows. The following settings I find useful for this simple but powerful text editor. YMMV.

# auto complete word autocompleteword.automatic=1

# advanced find and replace find.replace.advanced=1

# force [...]