User Forum Posts

Beginning in mid-2010 we have directed all technical support questions to the eValid User Forum. We have learned that when one user has an issue, all users can profit from the answer.

Here is an additional selection of some of the posts that we think would be of general interest.

• The Comparative Level of Effort of eValid Recording... -- Discusses the relative level of effort of using eValid versus other kinds of technical approaches.
• Comparing An Actual Value At Some DOM Element -- Explains how to compare an actual value in a page by reading and manipulating the current contents of the DOM.
• eValid Faithfully Emulates An IE Browser -- Discusses how we made sure that eValid was as close to IE behavior as possible.
• Can eValid Test An Application That Involves Two Browsers? -- Describes conditions under which two [or more] eValid instances can operate at the same time, in combinations of record AND playback.
• DOM Values -- How to use eValid commands to extract, save, and insert DOM values from one test context to another.
• Wht is your structural testing really good at? -- Describes when the structural testing methods are needed, and how effective they are.
• About "SyncOnText" -- Describes how eValid AJAX synchronization logic works, and what the overhead is likely to be when you are waiting for a DOM feature to synchronize AJAX activity.
• Query Strings -- Explains how to deal with URLs that have complex query string (client side parameters).
• A Different IP Address -- Details on when eValid can "spoof" being on a different IP address.

Please Contact Us for additional details about any of these topics.

Recent and Upcoming Conferences & Technical Community Events

Here are links to some technical meetings that may be of interest to WQN readers:

• 2nd International Workshop on the Quality of Service-Oriented Software Systems (QUASOSS'10), 4 October, 2010, Oslo, Norway
• 5th International Workshop on Systems Software Verification (SSV'10), 6-7 October 2010, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
• 8th CREST Open Workshop: Advanced Mootation* Testing 27 October 2010, University College, London, England (* "Mootation Testing" is a second order mutant of "Mutation Testing")
• 2nd International Workshop on Software Aging and Rejuvenation (Part of ISSRE 2010), 1 November 2010, San Jose, California, USA.
• 22nd IFIP International Conference on Testing Software and Systems (ICTSS), 8-10 November 2010, Natal, Brazil.
• 2010 Workshop on Verification, Validation and Uncertainty Analysis in High-Performance Computing (VVUHPC 2010), 14 November 2010, New Orleans, LA, USA.
• The Future of Software Engineering Symposium 22-23 November 2010, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland.

Community events like these deserve very careful consideration!

High BU-Count Server Performance Testing Projects

eValid users are already aware of the use of multiple eValid instances -- called Browser Users (BUs) -- to generate 100% realistic load on servers. Each BU runs as a separate Windows process, and each can handle very complex applications including AJAX and database-related applications.

To get high BU counts requires that we use two methods:

• The first method involves making OS parameter changes to increase the size of the virtual memory, increase the desktop heap size, and change the performance option to optimize for background operations.
• Even with these adjustments, each desktop user still runs up against a limit on the number of GDI Objects per user session. To overcome this constraint, we open additional user accounts on the driver machine.

Using EC2 cloud machines to drive very heavy BU-count loads, we usually employ 8-core High-Memory and/or High-CPU machine images. One such machine, properly configured, yields 1,000+ BUs per machine depending on the test duty-cycle and machine resource use. All of these methods come together in our PerformanceTest projects, which offer load generation up to 100,000 BUs in parallel,