Web protocols overview
Note: Applies to: Web Vuser protocols. For a list of web Vuser protocols, see Web Vuser types.
VuGen creates web Vuser scripts by monitoring and recording the web traffic that flows between a web browser and a web server while you perform typical business processes. The web traffic includes HTTP requests sent by the browser to the server, and the HTTP responses returned by the server.
When you run a web Vuser script, the resulting Vuser executes the web API calls and communicates directly with the web server, without relying on a browser or client software.
Suppose you have a website that displays product information for your company. The site is accessed by customers and potential customers. You want to make sure that the response time for any customer query is less than a specified value (for example, 20 seconds)—even when many users (for example, 200) access the site simultaneously. You use Vusers to emulate this scenario, where the web server services simultaneous requests for information. Each Vuser could do the following:
Load the home page
Navigate to the page containing the product information
Submit a query
Wait for a response from the server
You can distribute several hundred Vusers among the available testing machines, each Vuser accessing the server by using its API. This enables you to measure the performance of the server under the load of many Vusers.