LoadRunner is a software testing tool from

Micro Focus Micro Focus International plc is a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provides software and consultancy. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is ...

. It is used to test

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

, measuring system behaviour and performance under load. LoadRunner can simulate thousands of users concurrently using application software, recording and later analyzing the performance of key components of the application. LoadRunner simulates user activity by generating messages between application components or by simulating interactions with the user interface such as keypresses or mouse movements. The messages and interactions to be generated are stored in scripts. LoadRunner can generate the scripts by recording them, such as logging

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

requests between a client web browser and an application's web server.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States. HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the ...

acquired LoadRunner as part of its acquisition of

Mercury Interactive Mercury Interactive Corporation was an Israeli company acquired by the HP Software Division. Mercury offered software for application management, application delivery, change and configuration management, service-oriented architecture, change r ...

in November 2006. In Sept 2016, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced it is selling its software business, including Mercury products, to Micro Focus. As of 01-Sept-2017, the acquisition was complete.
On Dec 12, 2019, Micro Focus announced newer names for LoadRunner package and started following CalVer.
* LoadRunner is now LoadRunner Professional 2020 * Performance Center is now LoadRunner Enterprise 2020 * StormRunner Load is now LoadRunner Cloud 2020

Architecture

The key components of LoadRunner are: * Load Generator generates the load against the application by following scripts * VuGen (Virtual User Generator) for generating and editing scripts * Controller controls, launches and sequences instances of Load Generator - specifying which script to use, for how long etc. During runs the Controller receives real-time monitoring data and displays status. * Agent process manages connection between Controller and Load Generator instances. * Analysis assembles logs from various load generators and formats reports for visualization of run result data and monitoring data. Modules are available to enable LoadRunner to capture, replay and script different application and networking technologies. These include support for: * applications using Microsoft .NET and

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

* database servers such as

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ...

and Oracle * internetworking protocols such as

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

and

LDAP The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Directory servi ...

* e-mail protocols including

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

MAPI Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is an API for Microsoft Windows which allows programs to become email-aware. While MAPI is designed to be independent of the protocol, it is usually used to communicate with Microsoft Exchange Se ...

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most common ...

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients ty ...

* remote client technologies such as Citrix ICA and RDP. LoadRunner can be run standalone or multiple instances can pooled for use by several people under the control of LoadRunner Enterprise, formerly known as HP PerformanceCenter.

History

LoadRunner Cloud 2020

From 2010 Hewlett Packard started to offer on-demand versions of LoadRunner available by

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...

services such as

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment o ...

and later Microsoft Azure. Version 12.50 added the use of Google Compute Engine. Selected HP partners are also able to provide LoadRunner in the Cloud as an on-demand service from their SaaS platforms. StormRunner Cloud has been renamed as LoadRunner Cloud 2020.

Scripting Languages

LoadRunner client emulation scripts are usually created using the

ANSI C ANSI C, ISO C, and Standard C are successive standards for the C programming language published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 14 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and th ...

programming language. However, Java and .Net programs can also be run by LoadRunner. Version 12.50 added the use of JavaScript for Web-HTTP/HTML scripts. Scripts from other testing tools such as

Apache JMeter Apache JMeter is an Apache project that can be used as a load testing tool for analyzing and measuring the performance of a variety of services, with a focus on web applications. JMeter can be used as a unit-test tool for JDBC database connectio ...

Gatling The Gatling gun is a rapid-firing multiple-barrel firearm invented in 1861 by Richard Jordan Gatling. It is an early machine gun and a forerunner of the modern electric motor-driven rotary cannon. The Gatling gun's operation centered on a cy ...

, NUnit, and

Selenium Selenium is a chemical element with the symbol Se and atomic number 34. It is a nonmetal (more rarely considered a metalloid) with properties that are intermediate between the elements above and below in the periodic table, sulfur and tellurium, ...

can be run by LoadRunner by declaring an interface library. This enables scripts to send key-value pairs to the Controller as the script runs, enabling response times to be associated with specific conditions such as the number of items displayed in the User Interface. LoadRunner scripts can also be called from within Jenkins.

Support for JMeter Tests

LoadRunner 12.55 enables testers to run Apache JMeter scripts from Controller, alongside Vuser scripts can view the results to LoadRunner measurements. This feature is provided as beta version.

References

External links

LoadRunner Product Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:MicroFocus LoadRunner Load testing tools Micro Focus International