Changelog 2024.10

Loadster Monitoring Plans

Now that we’ve migrated Speedway into Loadster Site & API Monitoring, we’ve also made the same monitoring plans available to Loadster customers in one place.

On the Billing page you’ll now see three options: Loadster Fuel, Load Testing Plan, and Monitoring Plan. These aren’t mutually exclusive – it’s okay to only have a load testing plan and not a monitoring plan, or vice versa, or both, or neither. If you don’t have a load testing plan your load tests will burn fuel, and if you don’t have a monitoring plan your monitors will burn fuel.

It’s perfectly fine to just use pay-as-you-go Loadster Fuel for everything, but the plans might be a better deal if you load test often or run your monitors frequently.

Better Script Recording

We’ve released a major update to the Loadster Recorder Chrome Extension and Loadster Recorder Firefox Add-on to improve the way browser scripts are recorded. These script recording improvements should greatly improve your odds of getting a script that works consistently and reducing script flakiness if your site changes later.

Click Steps

You can now specify whether you want to record the click on the exact element that was clicked, or the element that actually handled the event. For example, sometimes buttons have nested icons, so although you may have clicked on the button’s icon, it’s the actual button you are interested in. Now, when you start a recording you can decide whether the recorded script should reference the exact elements you clicked or the elements that ultimately handled the click.

Hover Steps

The recorder can now optionally record Hover steps. This is helpful if your site has hover menus or other features that cause elements to appear only when another element is hovered. Previously, the recorder did not record Hover steps and they had to be added to the script manually afterwards. Now, when you start a recording you can decide whether to record hovers on no elements, all elements, or only on elements that have JavaScript mouseover or mouseenter event handlers or CSS :hover rules.

Selectors

The recording process now gives you more control over what types of selectors are added to the recorded script. Any element on a page could have multiple possible selector candidates that refer to it, and we want our recording to pick a selector that is both simple and stable. Especially if your site is built with a web framework that generates dynamic IDs or classes, you can now use regular expressions to tell the recorder which selector patterns to avoid to minimize flakiness.

Browser Script Timeline Improvements

After you play a browser script in the editor, the Timeline shows thumbnail screenshots so you can see how it went. Clicking on a thumbnail in the Timeline brings up a modal dialog more details about that step.

This dialog now has two new tabs: Browser Console and HTML Content.

The Browser Console tab shows whatever logs were in the bot’s browser console up until the time this step completed. If your site had JavaScript errors or other warnings in the console, you can see them here and use them to debug your script. Previously these console logs were included inline with the script’s logs, but they are now in their own tab for clarity.

The HTML Content tab shows the full HTML DOM of the site at the time the step finished. This is particularly useful if the step failed to resolve an element, because it allows you to look for that element in the DOM and modify the selector accordingly.

Other Improvements & Bug Fixes

• Added a top nav widget to show all load tests in progress, regardless of who on your team started them.
• Added the ability to drag bot groups to rearrange them in a scenario.
• Granted browser clipboard permission to Browser Bots, so you can copy text in your scripts.
• Fixed a bug with parsing blank response header values in a protocol script.
• Fixed a regression that prevented pasting a string into a script editor text field.
• Improved navigation in the Settings section.
• Improved the appearance of the Monitoring widget for users without any monitors.
• Made browser scripts automatically wait for elements to be visible and stable before clicking them, to prevent errant clicks.
• Improved error messages in browser scripts to specify when elements aren’t found or are invisible.