How can use WebDriver sampler in JMeter to mimic 100 users login and performing some action?

Question

I am working on creating a load test in JMeter:

1. 100 users login to the product at the same time.
2. Each user performs some UI action like running a user report or updating user profile page.
3. Each user then logs out of the web application.

Now, i am able to login successfully with one user and could not perform UI actions. So, if i use WebDriver sampler , then can i use headless browser. I dont want to open tabs in chrome, but just monitor the stress on the system and i want to do this only using JMeter. I am stuck.

Now, i want the ramp up time to be 5 minutes, load test for 30 mins, ramp down time to be 5 mins.

Kindly help me get started.

Answer 1

As per WebDriver Sampler documentation:

Note: It is NOT the intention of this project to replace the HTTP Samplers included in JMeter. Rather it is meant to compliment them by measuring the end user load time.

JMeter allows the creation of multiple threads, and each thread is responsible for creating load on the server. However, for the Web Driver use case, the reader should be prudent in the number of threads they will create as each thread will have a single browser instance associated with it. Each browser consumes a significant amount of resources, and a limit should be placed on how many browsers the reader should create. However, the load testing cloud providers may help to scale WebDriver test up to thousands of real browsers, look at BlazeMeter for example.

From experience, the number of browser (threads) that the reader creates should be limited by the following formula:

C = N + 1


where C = Number of Cores of the host running the test
and N = Number of Browser (threads).

As per Firefox 89 browser system requirements

Recommended Hardware

• Pentium 4 or newer processor that supports SSE2
• 512MB of RAM / 2GB of RAM for the 64-bit version
• 200MB of hard drive space

The question is: do you have 101 CPUs and 400 GB or RAM? If yes - go ahead, if no - consider conducting your test on HTTP protocol level, well-behaved JMeter test produces the same network footprint as the real browser does so from the server perspective it won't make any difference whether you're using JMeter's HTTP Request samplers or the real browser.

Answer 2

You can run the tests in headless mode by ticking the "Use Chrome headless mode" checkbox in the Chrome Driver Config element.

You can use a Synchronizing Timer to simulate users sending the login request at the same time.

It's not advisable to run many web driver samplers concurrently as explained in the other answer.

You may run the test and see how far you can proceed with the available machine. Then you can go for a distributed testing environment to simulate the required number of simultaneous users.

Note :