How to approach Traffic Parrot speed issues during load testing

We had one of our prospects reach out to us this week:

"I am stuck with my POC (Proof Of Concept project) on Traffic Parrot as I am facing out of memory issues at 30 TPS for 100 concurrent users for HTTP and IBM MQ JMS, please advise." -  Test Automation and Service Virtualization Consultant at an Australian Bank

Typically we advise starting by having a look at common approaches to speeding up Traffic Parrot for performance testing which is located here: https://trafficparrot.com/documentation/5.0.x/performance_testing.html

If the guidelines outlined there do not resolve the issue, please contact support@trafficparrot.com, and we will suggest how we can improve the performance of Traffic Parrot in your specific use case.

In this particular case increasing the memory from -Xmx128mb to -Xmx1g (Traffic Parrot JVM heap size increase from 128MB to 1GB) in jvm.args resolved the issue. The issue was that the request to response mappings used by the prospect were complex enough to require higher than standard use of memory for 100 concurrent users.

Traffic Parrot 5.0.0 release, whats new?

We have released Traffic Parrot 5.0.0. Here is a list of what is included in the new release:

Features

• New HTTP skeletons feature:
  • OpenAPI specifications are used to generate a list of HTTP skeletons that can be used to help design HTTP mappings in the Traffic Parrot user interface
  • Place OpenAPI specifications in the openapi configuration directory to populate the dropdown menu or use the upload button on the HTTP Add/Edit page next to the dropdown
  • This replaces the old scenarios.js dropdown, which has been removed (see changes section below for migration instructions)
• Maven plugin improvements:
  • New trafficparrot:check-environment goal to run in the pre-clean phase to check nothing is preventing a successful start of Traffic Parrot
  • Check that there is not an existing Traffic Parrot instance running
  • Check for locked files or directories that are unable to be cleaned on Windows (typically this is because a file is open in a text editor or command prompt)
  • Improved speed when cacheDownload is enabled by also caching the extracted zip file
  • Accept either file:/// or file:// syntax when specifying file URLs
  • Remember to upgrade your plugin version to 5.0.0

Fixes

• The randomInteger and randomDouble helpers now return a number type instead of a string, so that they can be combined with other helpers that require a number. For example when combined with the stringFormat helper: {{stringFormat '%02d:%02d' (randomInteger 0 59) (randomInteger 0 59)}}

Changes

• The scenarios.js HTTP dropdown has been removed.
  • We recommend migrating to an OpenAPI specification file which can be used to produce a similar dropdown via the new HTTP skeletons functionality
  • Please email help@trafficparrot.com with your scenarios.js file and we will translate it to an OpenAPI file for you
  • Removed unused property trafficparrot.gui.scenarios.resource.name
• Improved reporting of port clashes and how to change ports in trafficparrot.properties

I want to learn Service Virtualization

"I want to learn Service Virtualization for mocking. How can I do that?" - An anonymous trafficparrot.com website visitor.

We recommend looking at the Service Virtualization and API mocking tutorials available on our website, starting with Chapter 1: Getting started with stubbing, mocking and service virtualization and then Chapter 2: How to record and replay HTTP SOAP requests and responses to create API mocks.

If you would like to schedule a free 45-minute "Service Virtualization and API mocking" webinar for your company or your team, please reach out to contact@trafficparrot.com, and we will organise it at a time convenient to you and your team.

Do you have single user licenses?

Recently a website visitor asked:

"Do you have single user licenses?" - QA Lead at a Russell 3000 company, Pennsylvania.

Yes, we do support the single user scenario. For a single user, we have an option for a single floating license (only one instance allowed to be running at the same time).

If you are interested in single user licenses, we would be happy to provide a quote according to your requirements. Please contact sales@trafficparrot.com for more information.