Performance Test With Selenium

Selenium WebDriver is an automation tool for web applications. It can operate on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and many other browsers via its driver ecosystem.  JMeter, on the other hand, is a Java-based performance testing tool. They are both open-source, defacto tools for testing teams. In case you have your automated integration test, why not use them as a performance test script?

JMeter has a WebDriver plugin to support Selenium based scripting. You can download this plugin by JMeter Plugin Manager.

JMeter supports running your test via Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Therefore, you need to download Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer driver binaries.

• Chrome driver binary can be downloaded via http://chromedriver.chromium.org/
• Firefox GeckoDriver can be download via https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases

Let’s create our first test.

Step 1: Create a Browser Configuration

Create a Thread Group and add “Chrome Driver Config” from Config Elements menu.

Then, you need to give downloaded Chromedriver binary as a path to your Config Element.

Step 2: Implement Your Test

Add WebDriver Sampler under the Thread Group. This will bring a basic script, which opens a web page. We need to manipulate this script.

In order to interact with the browser, you need to use Selenium specific methods, like  sendKeys,  click(), etc.

Here are some tips:

Browse Open Command

This command opens the provided URL

WDS.browser.get(‘http://www.google.com‘);

In order to do some UI specific action, you need to import org.openqa.selenium package to your script. Just add this line to your script.

var pkg = JavaImporter(org.openqa.selenium);

SendKeys Command

If you are familiar with Selenium, you know that you can reach element by cssSelector, id, XPath etc.. pkg variable that we created, which helps you find the web element.  This is how you find an element. You store the webElement into a variable called searchField.

var searchField =

WDS.browser.findElement(pkg.By.cssSelector(‘input[name=\’q\’]’));

Then, you just use the standard Selenium function sendKeys to write some text.

searchField.sendKeys([‘loadium’]);

Click Command

Selenium has a built-in click command. You just use the same function after acquiring the webElement. First, we store the element and perform the click operation.

var searchButton =

WDS.browser.findElement(pkg.By.cssSelector(‘button[name=\’btnK\’]’));

searchButton.click();

Additional Commands

Besides those basic commands, we should use some commands specifically designed for JMeter, so JMeter will be able to capture sampler’s start and end time. Those two methods will send JMeter the start and end signals for reporting purposes.

WDS.sampleResult.sampleStart();

WDS.sampleResult.sampleEnd();

Log Command

You might want to do some logging during your test. Then you just use the below command.

WDS.log.info(“Sample started”);

The rest is the same as running a JMeter script on the cloud. All the configuration like concurrent user count, ramp up periods are configured as a JMeter test. At the end of test execution, performance test results will be in the same format, also.