Web Driver Sampler Best Practices

This document captures some of the more common setup and configuration when using Web Driver Samplers in your client side performance tests.

Keep the Samplers focused

The Web Driver Sampler do allow the scripter a lot of flexibility and control over what can be achieved within this sampler. However, it is recommended that the scripter keep to a single task within each sampler, so that the timing can be captured within each Sampler. Assuming the following are the sequence of tasks:

1. Go to a URL
2. Edit an item
3. Save an item
4. Load a list of items

It would be advisable to use a separate Web Driver Sampler for each of the tasks above. This has several advantages:

1. Each of the tasks above will have a name and its metrics can be captured and aggregated by JMeter
2. Problems/performance regressions with any one of those tasks is visible and easily diagnosed (especially if the performance tests are a part of CI)