Changelog 2022.08

Delayed Start for Bot Groups

By popular request, there’s now a way to delay the start of certain bot groups in your load test. This allows stair stepping patterns and other creative patterns for ramping the load.

The delayed start option is hidden under the wrench that appears to the right of each bot group.

Individual Keypress Actions for Browser Bots

Testing certain kinds of web apps (WebGL games, etc) requires generating individual keypress events in the browser window. This is different from typing text into an input field, so we’ve exposed a simple way to do it in code blocks.

browser.keyboard.press('ArrowUp');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowUp');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowDown');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowDown');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowLeft');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowRight');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowLeft');
browser.keyboard.press('ArrowRight');
browser.keyboard.press('B');
browser.keyboard.press('A');
browser.keyboard.press('Enter');

bot.wait(3000);

browser.screenshot();

Any plain character or a value from KeyboardEvent.key is acceptable.

Where the keypress event gets handled depends on what element on the page has focus. Your script might need to click on an element first to focus it, or click somewhere on the body to remove focus from an element if you want the keypress to be handled at the window level instead.

Speedway Updates

We’ve been busy with Loadster’s companion product, Speedway. Speedway lets you use your Loadster scripts, or new scripts, for 24x7 Site & API Monitoring.

New in Speedway this month is the ability to map different Notification Policies to each of your monitors. For example, you might want certain critical monitors to send immediate SMS messages to everyone on your team, and also raise the incident in PagerDuty and email everyone. Less critical monitors (like for your a staging site) might just email a single person.

Notification Policies are now more flexible, too. You can set a policy to delay notifications until the monitor has been in a failing state for a certain amount of time (like 10 minutes), so they don’t wake you up for network blips or issues that quickly took care of themselves.

Watch this space! There are exciting developments in the works for Speedway. It might even get its own Changelog soon instead of bumming off Loadster’s.

Other Improvements & Bug Fixes

• We’ve created a better getting started experience after creating your account. If you’ve been a Loadster user for a while, you’ll never see this. If you’re a new user, you won’t appreciate it either, because you didn’t have to do it the old way.
• Improved performance loading the Traces table in a test report for tests with lots of traces.
• Improved the generation of text selectors in the Loadster Recorder browser extension, for sites where the same text exists in multiple places.
• Links to invoices in emails when you complete a purchase are now permalinks. You can now access the Stripe invoice and receipt months later.
• Fixed the average response time calculation on the tile at the top of the test to be the average of all groups in the test, when there are multiple groups of bots. Tests with only one bot group were unaffected. The values in the Average Response Times graph below were similarly unaffected.
• Fixed an issue with clicking on a title in the Timeline selecting multiple steps in the editor, so it wasn’t clear which step the card correlates to.
• Changed the formats.base64decode() function to return a byte array instead of a string. Returning the decoded value as a string was kind of pointless because Base64 is mainly used to encode things that aren’t strings.