Changelog 2022.11

Browser Bot URL Instrumentation

You can now add extra instrumentation to measure the performance of background requests made by your Browser Bots. This includes asynchronous requests to your API or a 3rd party API, background scripts, etc.

Previously it was difficult to measure background request timings, because the ordinary Response Times graph only includes navigations when the browser URL changes, but does not include background requests that happen once the page has already loaded.

To capture timings on these background requests, you can now add extra instrumentation for specific URLs or URL patterns. The configuration for this is in the Browser Bots section of Settings.

You can enter one or more URLs or partial URLs (substrings), and any request made by the bot’s browser to a matching URL will trigger a sample with timing.

Instrumented URL timings will then show up in the load test report on a new graph called Instrumented URL Response Times.

Trace Limits & Filtering

Loadster captures traces to give you more visibility into what’s happening with individual bots in a load test.

The Traces table in a load test report now allows you to customize which columns appear, and filter the traces by column values. You can also search traces for a particular value.

This makes it easier to find the traces you’re interested in when you’re trying to figure out what went wrong in a test, or when you’re simply trying to spot-check that everything went right.

Because the trace data is quite heavy, not every bot can take a trace every time, but we’ve increased the limits to 250 info traces and up to 750 error traces per bot group. Previously each bot group could only take 500 traces of any type, which sometimes caused error traces to be omitted, particularly for errors that occurred late in the test.

Other Improvements & Bug Fixes

• The registration flow is now mobile-friendly once again.
• When launching a cloud cluster, Loadster now shows you more frequent updates about the launch process as instances are added to the cluster.
• Subscription cancellations now take effect at the end of the current term, instead of immediately.
• The Loadster Engine Docker image now specifies a high-numbered UID/GID to reduce the chance of UID clashes with the host system.
• Improved the handling of special characters in file names, when using Files steps in browser scripts.
• Fixed an inconsistency in the color of the finished test progress bar for tests with errors.
• Fixed a race condition that occasionally caused launch instability in very large cloud clusters.
• Fixed a regression that prevented file uploads from Browser Bots in a load test.