To achieve realistic load scenarios and therefore relevant test results, Populations must closely simulate a set of real users connecting to your application. Including Virtual Users that behave differently in a Population and finely tuning that Population are therefore essential.
To create a realistic Population
Define Virtual Users having different behaviors: Users connecting to your application will necessarily have different profiles each behaving differently. The first step in achieving realistic scenarios is therefore to create different types of Virtual Users and to include them in a Population.
For example, the Population called "RegularPopulation" includes three distinct types of users:
"RegularUser": It represents a user that often uses your application but spends most of his or her time just browsing through your catalog.
"RegularBuyer": It represents a user that does some browsing too but actually places orders and payments.
"Administrator": It represents in house staff who can remotely administrate your application.
Finely tune your Populations:
Consistently distribute Virtual Users:
"RegularUser": In the example, you may have decided that this type of user represents 85% (55% + 30%) of the users of your application. This is usually based on statistics or at least consistent forecasts of user distributions. You can also split this type of user into two sets based on the type of access they use. You may estimate that 55% of the users will have a broadband access to your application and that 30 % will only have limited access (512kbps download and 64kbps upload). The percentage used to define a distribution of Virtual Users in a Population will be interpreted when launching a load scenario using that Population. For example, if the load scenario defines a constant load policy with 100 users then 85 "RegularUsers" will be launched, 55 of which will have broadband access and 30 of which will have limited access.
"RegularBuyer": This type of user represents 10% (5% + 5%) of the users accessing your application : 5% of which have broadband access and another 5% that have limited access
"Administrator": Finally you may estimate that administrators represent 5% of the users of your application.
Tune other settings: NeoLoad provides additional elements that can be configured per user. These include browser, cookies and the number of HTTP connections that the browser will use to interact with the server. For more information, see Populations.