Quasi Performance/Load Testing with Katalon Studio
For real load testing scenarios there are dedicated tools. But, if you need a quick way to generate traffic from multiple users hitting the same page or pages, you can launch Katalon multiple times from the command line. Katalon will jump through pages far faster than you can do it manually, which can give an approximation of user load.
The first thing to do is to build a Test Suite that runs all the Test Cases you’re interested in. This could be test cases that fill in forms, click a series of link, or load one page after another.
Once that’s done, use the Build CMD button from the menu bar to generate the command line that launches Katalon and your Test Suite.
Open a Terminal prompt and switch to the Applications directory. Paste in the command line to load Katalon and start the test. After launching the first instance, open a new Terminal tab, switch to the Application directory and paste the command line again. Repeat several times to get multiple instances of Katalon and your browser running.
cd /Applications/
./Katalon\ Studio.app/Contents/MacOS/katalon –args -noSplash -runMode=console -projectPath=”/Users/XXX/Documents/GitHub/katalon/examples/Test1.prj” -retry=0 -testSuitePath=”Test Suites/New Test Suite” -browserType=”Chrome”
In each tab, Katalon will load and start executing the test. You should quickly see multiple browsers all running the defined Test Suite and pages loading.
Keep in mind, each execution is a full load of Katalon and the browser, so it will consume a fair bit of CPU power and RAM. My Mac Pro has 12 cores and 128GB of ram, so I’ve had 10 consecutive sessions running without incident. I could have easily opened more, but the traffic seemed sufficient. And to be honest, it was pretty amusing to watch.
This method clearly doesn’t compete with tools like Apache Jmeter, and I don’t know if Katalon condones such things, but if you need something quick, and have a good set of tests that can load a lot of pages, this works quite well.
