I am working on a site that uses the PayPal API. This new site will replace the old site at my job. As of right now, I need to check what data the old site sent to the PayPal API. Is there a way to check what data is being sent to and from a different site or API? It is data that is not typed in by the user, but data that already exists in the database that is being sent to the API.
Any help or advice would be great.
Thank you!
It "depends". On Windows platform you could use:
Fiddler or;
Microsoft Message Analyzer
to inspect traffic i/o (on the client system where either tool is installed). I'm sure other platforms will have similar tools.
Chrome Dev (or any other browser) tool will help with browser based traffic.
IMHO, depending on how "old" the existing system is, it maybe worth looking at the API again to see if any newer features are worth the effort since you're updating things...and seems to me getting paid/payments systems/ops would be something high on the priority list :)
Hth...
I have a system to test, which is a video ads distribution technology. I need to load every video like 1-2 mins to serve the ads. The videos are played in a Flash client and streamed as FLV streams like in YouTube.
The reason why I need to test it only via browsers -- and every other method won't work -- is to stress test both the video streaming servers and the ads servers simultaneously and displaying ads in real-time.
I have used Selenium, WatiN, Automation Anywhere and many other automation tools. However, when I am trying to start like 10000 browsers on my machine (32GB RAM, 16-core CPU), none of them are able to do the job.
With Selenium, I am able to start the maximum FireFox instances so far, but that's still too low: half of the instances don't run the test.
Any suggestions to do with Selenium?
You aren't going to run 10,000 browsers on your machine. That would give 3.2MB of physical memory per browser instance and I'm pretty sure FireFox just won't like that.
You could create a JMeter script that hits your server with many threads. It won't interact with the UI but would simulate the load of many clients hitting whatever URLs you tell it. I believe it also includes the ability to record a session and play it back for easy setup of your sessions.
Selenium isn't really optimized for load/stress testing, especially if you're running your browsers locally. Running 1000+ browsers is going to choke even the beefiest server. Though RAM is an obvious bottleneck, you also have limited CPU resources and bandwidth. The latter being a primary concern if you are loading videos.
Not to mention you'd be testing from a single IP with 10k browsers, so load balancing may not kick in properly, as well as the actual distribution of video ads to specific virtual users.
If you want to stick with existing Selenium tests, I've had good experiences with BrowserMob. They basically have a huge grid to do real browser load-testing, distributed across AWS.
Another recommendation would be an actual performance testing tool. I'd recommend Soasta CloudTest. They have a free version that runs 100 users so you can see if it will be a good fit for you. I have found that scripting for CloudTest is relatively simple.
Disclaimer: My experiences with both companies have been as a paying customer and I have never worked for either.
If you are using Windows machine then as per my experience there is a limit on number of browser window instances to be opened. As per my test last time, it does restrict between 100-150 browser windows.
I would recommend you using headless robot, which doesn't require opening browser window. I think latest version of Selenium has that capability. But it seems to be more like a load test as you are trying to simulate 10,000+ user instances, I would recommend you using load testing tool like JMeter or LoadRunner.
It looks to me that you are trying to verify what the client will see based on high traffic, no?
In that case, Joel is quite correct. If you absolutely have to see what the client sees, you could use threaded hits and just dump the results in a database. That'll show you anything the client would see anyway, and it's a lot easier to sort through than thousands of browser instances.
Either way, your client will not see errors if there are no errors present on the server side. If you're testing functionality in bandwidth restricted environments, CPU-intensive environments, or memory-intensive environments, those are much easier achieved than running thousands of browser instances.
Your post smells of some form of ad-based fraud to me, but either way: have you considered using different web browsers besides Firefox? PhantomJS is a headless webkit-based browser that is compatible with Selenium. It supports all the core browser features like DOM handling, CSS selectors, Javascript and Canvas. I do not know if it supports Flash.
This post has a decent list of other headless and automatable web-browsers that you might consider.
Also, if each browser instance is instantiating a Flash plugin, don't neglect the possibility that the issue could be with Flash and not Firefox. Alternatively, why instantiate several different Firefox processes? Can you accomplish what you want through the use of tabs instead?
The in-house way to this wiht selenium is using browsermob proxy and multiple broswser agents to recreate the experience of different users, changing the ip is more difficult because it requires changing your home network.
Here is a good example
Okay here is our setup:
Simple form being submitted via AJAX using Prototype 1.7 to a Apache server captured by ColdFusion. (We have noticed similar bugs on pages that submit form data in the conventional way but these pages are used far less.)
Some of our clients are reporting an error. After looking through the logs and doing live testing from their machine Firebug Light is reporting that the request was being sent with the post data.
However on the server side the post data is not present in raw logs or ColdFusion's FORM object or in GetHttpRequestData().
This problem has been isolated to IE only even when running Chrome Frame and is intermittent.
We can not reproduce this error with our IE8 installs on our machines OR on their machines running Firefox or Chrome.
Any thoughts on this extremely difficult bug to track down?
Do you have an HTTP proxy involved in this somewhere? We have had issues in the past, I can't recall the details, but I know that it had something to do with using AJAX to POST. The proxy was configured such that a certain combination of headers would make it misbehave. Take a good look at the HTTP headers coming from the browser, comparing one that works and one that doesn't.
Hi guys i have developed a web application that is hosted on client side test server, i have to check the response time of each page (loading) but i cant install any tool on the test server totally confused. guys give some idea.
Use FireFox and the Life-Of-Request info plugin. It will tell you how long until first byte, how long to display entire page. How many requests were made. Other stuff.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lori-life-of-request-info/
Does this need to be automated or can you do a one off for a few pages and call it a day?
FireBug add-on for Firefox (http://getfirebug.com/). It will help you with quite a few things related to web app development / testing. Specifically page response time can be tested in Net panel of FireBug: http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Net_Panel.
Looking for an open source web testing tool that can do Windows Authentication.
I've used openSTA and Pylot in very small amounts but found neither to do windows. openSTA says you can do NTLM here: http://www.opensta.org/docs/sclref/build-auth-blob.htm
I could not get it working - probably due to some config on the network or maybe my own mistake.
It would be a shame to limit your testing tool due to a matter of authentication. It is more practical to turn off NTLM / Windows Auth during stress testing. We have done this by adding a configuration parameter that allows the user name to be passed via URL only when configured in a stress / load testing environment. This causes a behavior change in exactly one place where we load and cache the current user. And it works with virtually any testing tool.
If you are testing an ASP.NET app, it is a matter of creating your own user principal and assigning it to the HttpContext.Current.User. A good place to do this is in the AuthenticateRequest event of an HttpModule or Membership Provider that you configure in only in the stress testing environment.
There is not much downside to this technique. This operates under the assumption that Windows authentication is relatively cheap and relatively small compared to the performance of the overall application. We have enjoyed a high confidence in our stress test results without it. The one caveat here is that IE will do a challenge/response with NTLM, so while it is not a perfect test, it is a very good test. And the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Maybe I am missing something about Windows Authentication, but I think that Selenium should be able to do that. Have you tried?
You could try out the Grinder project: NTLM support is a bit tricky but there are some details here:
http://grinder.sourceforge.net/faq.html#spnego (embedd link now dead - see comment from CruiZen)
or
http://bb10.com/java-grinder-user/2007-08/