Port mapping and traffic filtering overview

When you record a business process, a portion of the generated traffic is not related to the actual business process. For example, the Chrome browser accesses many external servers. This overhead may not be meaningful for the load test.

In addition, as a tester, you may not be interested in some of the generated traffic, even if you generate it during a recording session.

Another issue is a non-Internet business process. If you do not have Internet access, VuGen can successfully record the business process, but it will fail if you use a browser that constantly attempts to access the Internet.

The Port Mapping and Traffic Filtering features allow you to specify the behavior of specific traffic or exclude certain server:port combinations from your Vuser script.

Port mapping

When recording Vuser scripts that record network traffic on a socket level (HTTP, SMTP, POP3, FTP, IMAP, Oracle NCA and Winsock), you can set the Port Mapping options. Using these options, you can map the traffic from a specific server:port combination to the desired communication protocol.

The available communication protocols to which you can map are FTP, HTTP, IMAP, NCA, POP3, SMTP, and SOCKET. You create a mapping by specifying a server name, port number, or a complete server:port combination. For example, you can indicate that all traffic from the server twilight on port 25, should be handled as SMTP. You can also specify that all traffic from the server called viper, should be mapped to the FTP protocol, regardless of the port. Additionally, you can map all traffic on port 23 to SMTP, regardless of the server name.

When recording in multi-protocol mode, If at least one of the protocols records on a socket level, the Mapping and Filtering node will be available. Wildcards in the server name are not supported for port mapping.

For details on adding new port mappings, see Server Entry - Port Mapping dialog box.

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Traffic filtering

Traffic filtering extends the capabilities of port mapping by letting you list URLs and ports to exclude. In port mapping, you cannot use wildcards.

Using traffic filtering, you add an entry for each server that you want to exclude. You can use wildcards to exclude all traffic associated with a specific domain.

You may also specify a port or a range of ports. For example, you can filter out only SSL traffic coming through port 443. Once you define an entry, you can clear its check box to temporarily disable it.

You can select a filtering level:

  • Recording
  • Code generation

The advantage of excluding undesired traffic from the recording session, is that your script will be lighter, increasing its performance.

The benefit of only excluding traffic from the code generation, is that traffic will be recorded and will be accessible to you if you need it at a later point. You can then reapply a different filter without having to rerecord the business process.

For details on adding new traffic filters, see the Server Entry - Traffic Filtering dialog box.

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