Chapter 1. Introduction

The Flight Load Tester is a system for stressing a website or 'web application' to see how it might perform once launched, with lots of people are trying to use it at once. By allowing you to define the testing procedure using JavaScript, quite complex tests can be defined; however the basic functionalty can be used without needing very much JavaScript experience.

The Software

Flight Simulator

The main software component of Flight Load Tester is called the Flight Simulator. This does the actual load testing work by requesting webpages as if it were a user of the site (or as if it where hundreds or thousands of users of the site).

Features

Cookie support

Cookies are supported, allowing the system to work with sites that use sessions.

(No) Authentication support

Support is soon to be added.

Scriptability

You can produce complex behaviours by using JavaScript

Flight Recorder

This program allows you to record the steps you make as you visit a site. The result of doing this is a file which you can 'replay' with Flight Simulator.

Features

Cookie suport

Cookies set by the server are ignored (Flight Simulator takes care of them), but cookies which appear to have been set at the client (e.g. by browser scripting) will be recorded.

POST data

Unfortunately, posted form data is not currently captured

Conditional Requests

Conditional requests by the browser for objects Flight Recorder has seen before will be recorded relatively. i.e. Flight Simulator will be able to make the condition an object's actual last modification time, rather than the value when the script was recorded.