Dance of Bots

Was doing some research to find some higher volume incidents reported by TrueSight. Know that these due to increase bot activity but sometimes, not able to or not worth taking action if these volumes can be managed by the site.

Please find the Dance of Bots for the time interval I was exploring from Splunk.

Recording of 64 bit applications in LoadRunner 11.5

As per Release notes for LoadRunner 11.5:

Recording of 64bit applications has been added to the existing support for 64bit operating systems. 64bit applications can usually be recognized when the ‘*32’ suffix is not displayed in the Windows Task Manager for their process. Replay is in 32bit.

When you start VuGen, it will be displayed in the Task Manager as VuGen.exe *32. This means Vugen is running as a 32 bit application. You can use either 32 bit or 64 bit versions of IE to record. You need to browse and provide the paths. Default shown is IE 32 bit. Paths provided below for your reference.


"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" - 64 bit
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"- 32 bit

Some other pointers on IE are given below: 

To start the 64-bit version of IE, click Start, and then click Internet Explorer (64-bit). 

To determine the version of IE that you are using, click About Internet Explorer on the Help menu of Internet Explorer. If you are running the 64-bit version of Internet Explorer, the About Internet Explorer window includes a 64-bit descriptor label. The other one will not show a bit-level descriptor.

Avoiding Performance Testing in Production by mistake

Ever been in the situation that the tests you were running or supposed to be running in the Lab environment were actually running in production?

Why this could have happened?

• The tester was careless
• We are all prone to make mistakes.

All these happened because we were using a parameter file which were pointing to the production environment. In our case, we use the same scenario and modify the parameter file entries. One set of entries/URLs are of the Lab environment and the other set are of the Production environment. The file is supposed to contain the set for the right environment. 

I have a suggestion on how this can be prevented.

• Have a check in your code to see if the URLs you are using from the parameter file are pointing to production
• If so see if the current system date & time generated from the scripts matches an entry from another parameter file. I go for a time based counter with a two hour window. 
• If the time and date falls with in the 2 hour window in file, the scenario can continue execution. Else provide error messages and exit the vUsers. 
• So each time we need to run a test in Prod, we need to make sure that the parameter file has the right time and date for the execution to continue.

Also I would suggest setting up some alerting mechanism so that your monitoring team is aware of some tests  happening in production. We all want to inform them before starting our testing but do forget from time to time. I use Splunk regularly and have set up an alert in case the events per minute for the user-agent I am using is greater than a predetermined value. 

"I don't always test my code, but when I do, I prefer to do it in Production." :) 

Remove LoadRunner License

This article is valid for Windows 2008.

I have been trying to remove some extra licenses from the controller which got installed twice. It was strange that I could import the license again and again to keep on adding vUsers.

If you have tried support and yet not able to solve the issue, I would recommend looking at the below image and start from there. I am leaving the rest for you to find out.

Do so at your own risk.

How to clear WinINET cache and cookies from Fiddler

When trying to debug certain issues, it becomes necessary to clear the cache and cookies again and again. This being a repetitive task requires the use of short cut keys.

In case you are using Fiddler for your debugging and need to clear WinINET cache and cookies, it can be easily done using the QuickExec box. Execute the "nuke" command from the QuickExec box as shown in the image given below.