Pausing, Stopping, and Aborting

BrowserMob provides the ability the pause, stop, and abort a test. These capabilities give you the safety and control you need when using an on-demand load testing service. It is important to understand the behaviors or consequences of using these three features before you use them.

Pausing a Test

Pausing a test is a great way to temporarily “shut off the valve” and pause all traffic caused by the load test. It does not stop or abort the test and costs no additional credits to use. People often use it to temporarily disable the test, make some changes to their test environment (ie: configure additional sockets in Apache), and then resume the test.

Once a test is paused, you’ll see the state change accordingly. You’ll also notice that the test plan chart will begin to show the active user count dropping towards zero. It will stay at zero until you resume the test, after which is will climb back up to the planned users as quickly as possible.

Please note that pausing a test does not immediately stop traffic to your site. Instead, it simply ensures no new transactions begin to execute. This means that it may take a minute or two for the traffic to die down completely. The actual time will depend on how quickly the currently running transactions can complete.

Stopping a Test

Stopping a test is similar to pausing it, with the exception that you can’t resume it. When you stop a test, you ask BrowserMob to gracefully shut down the load test, allowing all currently running transactions to finish and for the load test system to collect the final results so that you can analyze them in detail. This includes error screenshots of browsers, the detailed database information (objects, steps, and transactions), and the ability to download the MySQL database dump to your own computer.

Most often people stop a test when they know they will not need to run the test any longer and would like to end the test in a non-emergency manner. They also do this because they want to collect and analyze the resulting data after the test has stopped.

Aborting a Test

Sometimes it is necessary to immediately shut down a test. This often happens when there is an unexpected consequence of a load test, such as it impacting production operations. Unlike when you stop a test, aborting a test will not wait for currently running transactions to complete or for any data to be collected. Instead, it will immediately and forcefully shut down all the computers participating in the test.

Because the data from the test is not collected afterwards, you should only abort a test if it is an absolute emergency, since you will not get any of the benefits of detailed result data or error screenshots, though you will retain the high-level charts.

Credit Refund Policy

Whether you stop or abort a test, you should be aware of the credit refund policy at BrowserMob. Rather than forfeiting all the credits you used to pay for the test, we try to refund any credits that were unused. Because our cost for a virtual user is on a per-hour basis, we do have to charge you for any hours or partial hours used in the test. But any unused hours will be refunded fully.

This means that if you scheduled a two hour test, ramping up from 0 users to 500 users, you will have paid 1000 credits for the test. If you stop or abort the test any time in first hour, you will receive a 500 credit refund. If you have any questions about this policy, please contact us and we’d be happy to discuss it further.

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