Load Testing from different geographies with Cloud-based load testing

Charles Sterling

Last week I was asked a pretty common question:

“How do you generate and distribute load in a Performance Test across different geographic locations”

This person knows our load Testing features well and knew about the new location picker (see below).

What they we were looking for in this dialog is a multi select and a slider like the Test Mix, Network and Browser selectors all have (see below)

-Which make total sense and one of the reasons we have a PM looking at the Load Test Wizard for “Freshening Up”…but not making any promises as that particular UI change has some fundamental architecture considerations.

Turns out despite not having it in the UI it is still relatively easy to do.  

The first thing you need to determine is the distribution you want and total user load. 

Say I want 1000 user load test with the distribution being:

• East Asia 50%
• East Us 10%
• Central US 10%
• West Us 10%
• East Europe 10%
• West Europe 10%

The next step is to create the load Test I want to use and make 6 copies.

In each of those 6 copies you will need to set the appropriate location and User Count.

(see below).

At this point you could manually kick off each of those load tests or execute them from the command line.

Please see: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2015/08/24/cloud-load-test-support-in-mstest-exe-command-line-and-xaml-builds.aspx

Charles Sterling

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