What’s new in LoadRunner 9.51?

LoadRunner 9.51 is a patch for for LoadRunner 9.50 which adds some minor functionality (including SiteScope 10.0 compatibility) and, according to the release notes, fixes bugs raised in 48 service requests. Readers interested in the major additions to the most recent major release of LoadRunner should read the Tech Tip on new features in LoadRunner 9.50.

Still with us? Good.

A lot of performance testers have learned to wait for the first service pack before upgrading to the newest version of LoadRunner. I certainly found that LoadRunner 9.50 had one or two annoying bugs. Hopefully this patch will fix them.

This 201 MB patch is available from the HP Software Support site under Document ID: KM750376, and must be installed on top of LoadRunner 9.50. Note that all of this information can be found (in a slightly different format) in the readme.htm file that comes with the patch.

Enhancements

• Added support for SiteScope 10.0.
• TCP mode support – TCP mode is now fully supported by the Webtrace utility and the Network Delay Time monitor on Windows platforms (including XP and Vista).
• Flex Externalizable Run-Time Settings – New options that display the settings used during script recording and allow you to edit the location of the JAR files.
• New Diagnostics graph in Analysis – The new J2EE/.NET Probes Metrics graph displays performance metrics collected by HP Diagnostics probes. Metrics include JVM related data such as Heap usage and Garbage Collection, application server specific metrics, JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) metrics, and more.
• New throughput graph in Analysis – In addition to the existing throughput graph, a new throughput graph, Throughput (MB), has been added to enable viewing throughput in megabytes.
• New date formats in Analysis – New date format configuration options have been added in Analysis (Tools > Options > General) for newly created sessions.
  The new options are Traditional Chinese and Local Regional Options (the date format as defined in the current user’s regional settings).
• Post collate command in Controller – In the post collate command, you can now use the %ResultDir% keyword to refer to the scenario’s results directory.
• Citrix XenApp Plugin for Hosted Applications 11 – Citrix Protocol now supports the XenApp Plugin for Hosted Applications version 11.
• Citrix window sizes – Citrix Protocol supports additional window sizes (including widescreen resolutions). This can be configured in the Recording Options dialogue box.

Service Requests (bugs fixed)

• AJAX (Click & Script) – Added support for specified property of DOM elements.
• Analysis – Resolved issue of converting templates from version 8.1 to version 9.50.
• Analysis – Resolved issue of Analysis HTML report not displaying graphs with large amount of measurements.
• Analysis – Resolved issue of saving graph scale settings per session.
• Analysis – Resolved issue of saving specified Word report location in Analysis.
• Analysis – Resolved issue of Analysis template not saving custom settings of display options for a graph.
• Citrix – Resolved issue of snapshots being overwritten/deleted.
• Citrix – Resolved following Citrix NFuse recording issues:
  • Defect in COM initialization during record start up that results in Citrix client unexpectedly shutdown.
  • Changed resolution setting implementation.
• Citrix – Resolved errors with memory overruns resulting in unexpected shutdown during replay.
• COM/DCOM – Resolved the issue of replay failure when calling to MoveForward or MovePrevious functions on the Recordset without checking if the current record is EOF or BOF respectively.
• Controller – Resolved issue in Japanese environments of saving manual scenarios that use percentage mode.
• Controller – Resolved issue in Controller of Schedule by Group option reverting to Schedule by Scenario when and all groups are de-selected.
• Controller – Resolved issue of large volume of trace lines printed in log file when running scenario from command line.
• Controller – Resolved issue using Step up by x hits per second option in goal oriented scenario.
• Controller – Resolved issues with sorting in Controller scenarios.
• Flex/AMF – Resolved code generation/replay unexpected shutdown.
• Flex/AMF – Resolved unexpected shutdown during replay of flex_amf_call.
• FTP – Resolved issue of uploading files in secure FTP.
• Java – Resolved issues with lr.exit command.
• Java – Resolved issues with parameterizing long strings.
• Java – Solved Java NULL values to allow parameterization.
• Media Player (MMS) – Added multicast support.
• ODBC – Resolved replay unexpectedly shutdown due to incorrect parameter substitution.
• Oracle (2-Tier) – Resolved issue of unexpected shutdown while recording Oracle Instant Client application.
• Oracle (2-Tier) – Resolved date format representation issues.
• Oracle (2-Tier) – Resolved UTF16 specific issue: Business data is represented as ??? instead of actual data.
• Oracle (2-Tier) – Resolved problem of SQL statements with special characters.
• Oracle NCA – Resolved replay issues with nca_flex_set_cell_data function.
• Oracle NCA – Resolved replay issues with nca_flex_set_cell_data_press_ok.
• Oracle NCA – Resolved unexpected shutdown during replay of Web-based protocols (for example, Oracle NCA).
• Oracle NCA – Resolved replay issues with nca_lov_retrieve_items.
• Oracle NCA – Modified logic related to focus behavior to send property 202 instead of property 534 on edit item.
• RDP – Resolved issue of Sync On Image Failure dialog box sometimes displaying incorrect image of the Replay screen.
• RDP – Added ability to control the size of the receive buffer of the RDP socket.
• RDP – Resolved issues of replaying Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007.
• RDP – Fixed Run-Time viewer freeze after first iteration when running multiple iterations.
• VuGen – When running scripts created using the IDE add-ins, there is no need to install add-ins on the load generator.
• Web (Click and Script) – Fixed regression from version 9.0 when using verification on Click and Script’s web_list.
• Web (Click and Script) – The definition of the EMBED element was changed from non-containing to containing.
• Web (HTTP/HTML) – Resolved problems with converting HTTP request body from UTF-8 to local machine settings.
• Web (HTTP/HTML) – Resolved issue with the length of the input parameter in web_convert_param.
• Web (HTTP/HTML) – Resolved issue with obtaining proxy settings from Internet Explorer 7.
• Web (HTTP/HTML) – Resolved issue with lr_paramarr_random: Function failed to work correctly when the left and right parameter braces were <> or [] instead of {}. It returned NULL in these cases.
• Web (HTTP/HTML) – Resolved issue with lr_xml_transform step in Test Results report.
• Web (HTTP/HTML) – PAC URL is no longer converted to lower case.
• AJAX (Click & Script) – Disabled snapshot creation during recording for ajax_xxx steps and added recording option to change this behavior.

So there is nothing particularly exciting in this release, unless you were affected by one of the bugs that have been fixed.

In my opinion, the best part of this release is the HP Performance Monitoring Best Practices document that is provided as a supplement to the HP LoadRunner Monitor Reference document that is included with every release of LoadRunner. You can find this document in “C:\Program Files\HP\LoadRunner\help\Monitoring_BP.pdf” after you install the LoadRunner 9.51 patch.