The main goals when load testing your application are to obtain an accurate evaluation of performance and to precisely identify performance bottlenecks. To achieve these goals, it is essential to design scenarios that define realistic populations and realistically-behaving Virtual Users. In addition, one technique that will greatly help you to in refining your benchmarks is to use what are known in NeoLoad as Transactions.
A Transaction is a set of related pages that achieve a consistent business interaction. A typical example is the set of pages a user goes through to log in to an application. The idea is to gather these pages into a Transaction so that NeoLoad can produce precise time consumptions and statistics on these pages as a whole. These Transactions will appear separately in test results making analysis easier. In the login example, you would obtain statistics on the response times users experience from the moment they start connecting to the application to the moment they are actually logged in.
The first step in using Transactions is to identify recurring behavior, especially behavior that represents an important functionality in your application. Once this behavior pattern has been identified, the corresponding pages must be assembled in a Transaction, a Virtual User Transaction in NeoLoad parlance. This tutorial details the steps involved in building these Transactions.
Virtual Users are one of the main building blocks NeoLoad provides to create load test scenarios. Virtual Users assemble recorded HTML pages, Populations group Virtual Users and, finally, a load test scenario assembles Populations. This tutorial will briefly describe the steps involved in building a Virtual User that has a Transaction. It will also show the types of results obtained using this technique.