There are hundreds of performance testing tools for the web. The tool I’ve been using the most for the last 10 years is a part of the web test tools in Visual Studio. Microsoft officially deprecated these tools with the 2019 release. The deprecation is not surprising given how Microsoft has not updated the tools in 10 years. While the rest of the world has moved web testing to open standards like JSON, HAR files, and interoperability with developer tools in modern browsers, the VS test tools still use ActiveX controls, and require Internet Explorer.

Steve Smith recently asked VS Users what tool they plan on using in the future.

In the replies, a few people mentioned a tool I’ve been experimenting with named K6.

You can install K6 locally, or run K6 from a container. The documentation covers both scenarios. In addition to the docs, I’ve also been reading the Go source code for K6. I’ve had a fascination with large Go codebases recently, although I think I’m ready to try another new language now, perhaps Rust or Scala.

There were a few features of the Visual Studio test tools that made the tools useful and easy. One feature was the test recorder. The test recorder was an ActiveX control that could record all the HTTP traffic leaving the browser and store the results into an XML file. The recorder made it easy to create tests because I only needed to launch IE and then work with an application as a normal user. Although XML isn’t in fashion these days, the XML format was easy to modify both manually and programmatically. The tools also offered several extensibility points you could hook with C# for pre and post modifications of each request.

K6 also makes test creation an easy task. Any browser that can export a HAR (HTTP archive) file can record test input for K6, and the developer tools of all modern browsers export HAR.

You can modify the JSON HAR file by hand, or programmatically. You can also use K6 to convert the HAR file into an ES2015 module full of JavaScript code.

Here is what the generated code looks like.

group("page_2 - ", function() { let req, res; req = [{ "method": "get", "url": "https://odetocode.com/blogs/scott/archive/2019/04/04/on-the-design-of-app-launchers.aspx", "params": { "cookies": { ".ASPXAUTH": "73..." }, "headers": { "Host": "odetocode.com", "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0", "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8", "...": "..." } } },{ "...": "..." }]; res = http.batch(req); sleep(0.69); }); 

There is an entire API available in K6 with extensibility points for cross cutting concerns. With a script in hand, you can now run load tests from k6.

The above run was with a single VU – a single virtual user, but you can add more users and run k6 in a cluster, or in the cloud. In short, K6 has all the features of Visual Studio Load Tests, although with no UI tools for beginners. However, the APIs and command line are easy to use and rely on standard tools and languages. The current Azure load test offerings require either a web test from Visual Studio, or, a single URL for a simple test. Until this Azure story improves to add more sophisticated test inputs, K6 is a tool to keep in the toolbelt.