BrowserMob is an external load testing service, meaning traffic originates from outside your firewall. We believe this is the most realistic way to test your web applications, as it properly shows how your site will be perceived by actual end users using real web browsers from external locations, such as their homes or offices. The topic of whether you should test on a production or production-like staging environment is discussed here, so please read that as well.
There are three common approaches if your application is only available internally:
- Deploy your application temporarily to a public or semi-public location. You can keep the URL secret, but it needs to be accessibly by the BrowserMob network.
- Open up your corporate firewall to allow the BrowserMob network to access your internally deployed application. See here for a list of the IP addresses that BrowserMob traffic comes from.
- Use an open source load testing tool, such as JMeter or OpenSTA, to simulate basic traffic internally. Then, when it’s time to do a full scale test, try option #1 or #2 when using BrowserMob.
If you’d like to try option #1 (deploy your app externally) but don’t have any hardware readily available to do it, we strongly encourage you to look at Amazon EC2. It’s one of the networks that BrowserMob runs on and can allow you to rent machines for as little as 10 cents an hour. For a couple of dollars, you can build a temporary staging environment that is still private but allows BrowserMob to test it’s performance.
I also find that it’s helpful to setup ssh tunnels for this case. You can temporarily create an ssh tunnel out on the internet that tunnels connections back to my development machine on the local network.
For instance, in this command, I log into remote-server.com and setup a tunnel between it’s port 8000 to my local port 8000:
ssh -R \*:8000:127.0.0.1:8000 @remote-server.com