Recorded Test Scripts

The standard, and easiest, method of creating a test script is to use the Silk Performer Recorder, Silk Performer's engine for capturing and recording traffic and generating test scripts.

First, the Silk Performer Recorder captures and records a representative amount of real traffic between a client application and the server to be tested. When recording is complete, the Silk Performer Recorder generates either a test script or a capture file. You can create scripts out of the capture file later on. The script is written in Silk Performer's proprietary scripting language, the Benchmark Description Language (BDL).

During the recording phase, you define transactions. A transaction is a discrete piece of work that will later be assigned to a virtual user in a load test and for which separate time measurements will be made. You should create a new transaction only for a piece of work that has no dependencies on another piece of work. Individual time measurements can be made for any action or series of actions that happen during recording.

Using the Silk Performer Recorder has a number of advantages:

• Recorded traffic and function calls include a lot of static information. Replay of static information ordinarily does not lead to reliable benchmark results. Because recorded scripts can easily be customized, you can add random functions to generate dynamic and realistic workloads .
• Transactions defined during recording modularize the script into clearly laid out sections. It is easy to modify workloads based on different statistics or requirements using the randomization functions embedded in Silk Performer.
• Timers set during recording provide user-defined granularity for measuring any part of a transaction.
• Development time and costs can be reduced considerably. There is no need to change the front-end application to simulate new behaviors. It is sufficient to modify the script and repeat the simulation until the requirements are met. The front-end application has to be implemented only once; the script then becomes its prototype and reproduces its behavior.