Glossary

Virtual User

Simulates a real user navigation. It is basically a succession of web pages. It may contain logical actions such as containers, loops and delays for a more complex behaviour.

Population

A population is a set of Virtual Users. It allows testing your site with different business behaviours. A typical use is to test a commercial site with 90% of users that browse the product catalog while 10% are doing a full purchase transaction.

Scenario

Describes all the settings of a load test: the duration, the load policy (ramp-up, constant, peak), the number of Virtual Users to generate,... NeoLoad handles multiple scenarios in a project.

Load Generator

Program that plays the scenario by simulating the desired number of users. A new program is launched for each test and exits when the test has finished. That ensures that the program is in a clean state before any test.

Load Generator Agent

The Load Generator Agent listens for NeoLoad Controller request to start/stop the load generator for each load test. An agent is embedded in the NeoLoad Controller for user convenience. Separate Load Generator Agent can be installed on remote Load Generator computers.

Think Time

Time to wait before playing a web page, simulating the time spent by the real user to read the previous page before clicking the link to the current one.
When running a test, a global think time can be defined for all pages (use Variables for random values in a range), or the test can use the Think Time defined on each page.

Variable

Variables allow adding dynamic content to the scenario. A typical use is to set variables as parameter values when submitting an HTML Form, or to set username/password on login.
The different kind of variables are counters, list, random integer, random String, Date,...

Web page

Represents a web page as displayed in a Browser. It is composed of an HTML page and its sub components such as images or css files.

HTTP request

This is the physical HTTP request to the server to retrieve an HTML page, an image or a CSS file.

User proxy

Classic proxy server to be used to connect to the server.

Recording proxy

The NeoLoad recorder used to record a scenario. It is seen as a Proxy by the browser. This recording proxy can use the user proxy if needed.

Standard Deviation

The standard deviation shows the response time variation against the average response time. When the value is high, the response time is very fluctuating. When the value is low, the response time is very constant and steady.

Average 90%

The average 90 percent is computed from the average response time after removing the 5% minimum values and 5% maximum values. The aberrant points are ignored. The result is near of what most of end-users get as response time.

Time to First Byte (TTFB)

The number of milliseconds that have passed before the first byte of the response was received.

Assertion

Assertion for validation. Allows validating the server response during the test. Validation can be based on the response content, size or duration.










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