2

Visual Studio Load Tests allow various browser to be simulated in the load presented. The available browsers are given by ".browser" files in directories such as (for Visual Studio 2013):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\Templates\LoadTest\Browsers

Where can I find ".browser" files for recent versions of popular browsers? The versions provided with Visual Studio 2013 are quite old.

Improve this question
2

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

Although I have never used the Visual Studio load test functionality I think it works in the following way:

You specify some browser types and the load testers does HTTP calls with those browser user-agent. Its not starting a real browser to make the calls, that would be to complex and consume lots of cpu and memory. The browser list on MSDN contains browsers you can't even install on a windows machine like Safari for iPhone. This leads me to think this assumption is correct. This is also how other load test tools work, like jMeter and Funkload.

So you only need new .browser files if the back-end server serves different kind of content to these user-agents. For example mobile content, localisation or browser specifics.

The .browsers file content looks like this:

<Browser Name="YOURBROWSERNAMEHERE" MaxConnections="6">
  <Headers>
    <Header Name="User-Agent" Value="YOURUSERAGENTHERE" />
    <Header Name="Accept" Value="*/*" />
    <Header Name="Accept-Language" Value="{{$IEAcceptLanguage}}" />
    <Header Name="Accept-Encoding" Value="GZIP" />
  </Headers>
</Browser>

Possible more header fields are supported: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields

You should be able to create any combination of header settings to test any different types of content you web-server is serving browsers. I do wonder if you really need load this specific, I don't think the bottle-necks are in the different type of content, but in disk-IO and networking.

Improve this answer
3
  • The .browser file contains the user agent string plus several other values. My customer wants me to simulate users on mobile, Macs, and desktops using various recent browsers. With effort I might find the user agent string, but the other values (such as number of parallel requests issued) are harder to find. Hence I would like to have good versions of the files. Just making them up is easy but useless.
    – AdrianHHH
    Commented Feb 11, 2015 at 21:58
  • There is no list of good versions of the files at this moment, the other values you can find by setting up a web-server and connecting the actual browsers to it and monitor their behavior. Loadtests mimic browsers, if you want to simulate actual modern browsers I would write a simple selenium test and run against a service like Saucelabs, which you can also use to manual run these browsers against andylangton.co.uk/tools/check-browser-headers to get the header info.
    – Niels van Reijmersdal
    Commented Feb 12, 2015 at 7:53
  • I wouldn't worry to much about the max connections per client, but here is somewhat more recent list: sgdev-blog.blogspot.sg/2014/01/…
    – Niels van Reijmersdal
    Commented Feb 12, 2015 at 7:54

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.