One of the highlights of Silk Performer 16.0 is the new network emulation feature. You can now simulate a variety of wired, wireless, and mobile networks by using one of the preconfigured settings or by adjusting the network parameters on your own. In this blog post, we will go through a real-world example to illustrate what settings to choose and what knobs to turn. So, let's get going. Our starting point For this example, let's suppose that you are a developer who is located in London and you want to load test your newly designed web application. You know that many of your future customers will access the application from the eastern part of the United States and you know that an increasing amount of your customers will use a mobile device to do so. Therefore, you're planning to run a couple of load tests with Silk Performer before you launch the application. But how do you configure Silk Performer to best simulate your future customers? This is where network emulation comes in. We are going to create a profile and configure a mobile device and an appropriate network connection for it. Creating a project and recording the application But first of all, we are creating a new project in Silk Performer 16.0, with the application type web business transaction . Give the project a name, enter the URL of your web application and start the recording. Now you can perform some typical tasks in your web application. When you're done, close the browser and stop the recording. Now we'll be creating the above-mentioned profile. Creating a profile Expand the Profiles node in the tree on the left side and double-click the given profile to open the profile settings. Click Web (Protocol Level) on the left side and select some mobile device from the Browser list - for example iPhone . Emulating a network connection Now click Internet on the left side. Here on the first tab (with the name Emulation ), you'll find all necessary settings to simulate a wired, wireless, or mobile network connection. As we've just specified, the virtual users with this profile will use iPhones. Therefore, they will use a mobile network to connect to your web application. So let's select Mobile and HSDPA , or the connection standard that fits best your customers. For the Distance To Server , you'll have to select Long (Intercontinental) , because your customers from the eastern United States will access your web application, which is hosted in London. These three settings - the Connection Type and the Distance To Server - control the four network emulation parameters on the bottom of the pane. These parameters are: the bandwidth down the bandwidth up the latency the packet drop To learn more about the parameters, take a look at this Help topic: Network Emulation . When you play around with the presets, you'll find out that the connection types control all four parameters, whereas the distance to server controls just the latency. You can start by selecting a preset and then tweak the parameters. When you're happy with your settings, click OK . It's good practice to give your profiles meaningful names, so let's right-click the profile, click Rename profile and give it a name. In our example, we name the profile iPhone HSDPA . Creating more profiles It makes sense to create additional profiles, since not all of your customers will be from the United States and not all of them will use a smartphone to access the web application. So feel free to create more profiles to make the crowd of your virtual users more realistic. We've created two more profiles for our load test: A profile with the name Laptop WLAN and one with the name Local Highspeed. Running the load test Now you can run through the workflow bar to adjust all the other settings for your load test like adjusting the workload, assigning and trying out agents, and so on. When you're done, click Run Test . In our example, we've decided to run an increasing load test with 5 virtual users per user type and a simulation time of 5 minutes. When you're ready to start your load test, click Run . Analyzing the load test results Now we have some time to go and get a coffee while Silk Performer puts load on our web application. When the load test is executed, the summary page displays. Click Explore detailed report on the right side In the overview part of the report, we can see our three user types and the three profiles that we'd created. Let's see if the report shows the expected results. When a user accesses the web application from around London through a highspeed Internet connection, the access time must be quite short. In contrast, when accessing the application from the United States through a smartphone and an HSDPA connection, the access time has to be considerably longer. And finally, accessing the application through a laptop and a wireless LAN connection will be somewhere in between. If we take a look at the Session Busy Time , the values meet these expectations. However, the main value of the results lies not in varifying obvious expectations but in actual access times. For example: Take a look at the Average Page Time for the iPhone HSDPA profile. On average, a user has to wait 2.3 seconds for each page to be fully loaded. That might already be enough for people to logout from the application. If the results are not satisfying, it might be a good idea to get back to the web application and try to find ways to improve its performance. Conclusion Since Silk Performer 16.0, it is possible to let your virtual users use a specific virtual network connection to access an application. As you've seen above, configuring such a virtual network is done in just a few steps. To use network emulation in Silk Performer, make sure to install the network emulation driver during Silk Performer setup. Watch the network emulation video You can also watch the following video to learn how to use network emulation in Silk Performer 16.0: (Please visit the site to view this video) More information To learn more about all new features and enhancements Silk Performer 16.0 provides, take a look at the following blog posts: Offline Scripting Released: Silk Performer 16.0 In the Silk Performer documentation, you can also find detailed information about all new features: What's New in Silk Performer 16.0
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