LoadRunner Part # 5 - Inroduction to Loadrunner

Guide to Download and Install HP LoadRunner 12.0 - here

Introduction to HP LoadRunner

LoadRunner is a Performance Testing tool which was pioneered by Mercury in 1999. Loadrunner was later acquired by HP in 2009.

LoadRunner supports various development tools, technologies and communication protocols. In fact this is the only tool in market which supports such large number of protocols to conduct performance testing.

LoadRunner is not only pioneer tool in Performance Testing, but it is still market leader in the Performance testing paradigm. In a recent assessment, LoadRunner has about 85% market share in Performance Testing industry. 

Broadly, LoadRunner supports RIA (Rich Internet Applications), Web 2.0 (HTTP/HTML, Ajax, Flex and Silverlight etc.), Mobile, SAP, Oracle, MS SQL Server, Citrix, RTE, Mail and above all, Windows Socket. There is no competitor tool in the market which could offer such wide variety of protocols vested in single tool.

What is more convincing to pick LoadRunner for performance testing is the credibility of this tool. LoadRunner has long established reputation as often you will find clients cross verifying your performance benchmarks using LoadRunner. You'll find relief if you're already using LoadRunner for your performance testing needs.

LoadRunner is tightly integrated with other HP Tools like Unified Functional Test (QTP) & ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) with empowers you to perform your end to end Testing Processes. 

LoadRunner works on a principal of simulating Virtual Users on the subject application. These Virtual Users, also termed as VUsers, replicate client's requests and expect corresponding response to pass a transaction.

Why do you need Performance Testing?

An estimated loss of 4.4 billion in revenue is recorded annually due to poor web performance.

In today's age of Web 2.0, users click away if a website doesn't respond within 8 seconds. Imagine yourself waiting for 5 seconds when searching over Google or making a friend request on Facebook. The repercussions of performance downtime are often more devastating than ever imagined. We've examples such as those that recently hit Bank of America Online Banking, Amazon Web Services, Intuit or Blackberry.

According to Dunn & Bradstreet, 59% of Fortune 500 companies experience an estimated 1.6 hours of downtime every week. Considering the average Fortune 500 company with a minimum of 10,000 employees is paying $56 per hour, the labour part of downtime costs for such an organization would be $896,000 weekly, translating into more than $46 million per year.

Only a 5 minute downtime of Google.com (19-Aug-13) is estimated to cost the search giant as much as $545,000.

Its estimate that companies lost sales worth $1100 per second due to a recent Amazon Web Service Outage.

When a software system is deployed by an organization, it may encounter many scenarios that possibly result in performance latency. A number of factors cause decelerating performance, few example may include:

• Increased number of records present in the database
• Increased number of simultaneous requests made to the system
• larger number of users accessing the system at a time as compared to the past