Background
We are about to perform load testing of a our application using a load testing tool say Visual Studio Team System or load runner. Before we initiate we need to plan the network capacity needed for full load. If the load testing environment is in a locked room air gaped with rest of network, this is not an big impact. But it is good to know, if we are running load test in same enterprise network with users and especially running the during the peak business hours. It looks wired but some people actually does this way.
Lets assume our application is simple web based single page application with some web apis. Both hosted in same web server(s)
Aim
Find out the total network payload between 2 machines/IPs for a specified time interval. This can be used to measure traffic to the application when load test scenarios are executed.
Tools
There are lot of tools. F12 can be seen as one. But F12 is not enough as it capture the http traffic. Other than http data, there are lot of handshaking and all happening to establish connection.
Apart from http data size 291KB what is shown in above screenshot, we need to find out actual traffic.
Lets see how this can be done using Wireshark.
How to measure using Wireshark
First we need to find out the IP of the application. In this scenario we can taking http://joymononline.in as the application to load test
Finding the destination IP address
Simple if the target server supports ping. Below is a screenshot which does the same
Wireshark statistics
Wireshark has Statistics menu, that can show the conversations happened between 2 IPs.
Below are the steps
- Run Wireshark. Make sure selecting the right network adapter. In this case its from Laptop with home broadband connected via WiFi.
- Filter the traffic by entering proper filter
- Do the operations. In this case just opened http://joymononline.in in browser
- Pause Wireshark
- Open Statistics->Conversations
- Check the "Limit to display filter" checkbox at the bottom left.
- Select IPv4.1 tab. (It really depend on the scenario what needs to be captured)
The Bytes shows total bytes transferred. in this case 305k the Bytes A->B and Bytes B->A shows the directional communications.
Measure traffic in load test scenario
In the real scenario to measure the traffic, the full scenarios / use cases of load test can be executed with single user once the Wireshark runs. If there are load generating agents, the Wireshark has to run there to capture traffic.
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