I love discovering a new feature in Loadrunner

It's not often you get a "wow" moment when you're running performance tests, but yesterday I had one.

I'd been running tests using vugen and Loadrunner controller - but everytime I wanted to shift environments I would recode the script either with a "Hostname" parameter file or by using lr_save_string to store the base url for the environment under test.

No big deal really - except I've just built an all singing all dancing Hour in the Life of scenario. A scenario with 20 different scripts all set to run at different rates - comparable to a single servers expected load on our site.

Again not particularly earth shattering.

However....

I have just received 3 new servers with Windows Server 2008 R2 - and

I wanted to run the same HILO test against this to get a comparative benchmark of the better hardware , running with a newer O/S.

Suddenly it dawned on me - I was going to have to change each of the 20 script files everytime I wished to change the target of my test.

But then while fishing around (really I was googling) and playing around in the run-time settings on the controller I discovered a mysterio setting - that I've been overlooking for years...

Additional attributes.

To use this all I needed to do was to change the lr_save_string command to read the additional attributes and then all would be good.

For example : lr_save_string(lr_get_attrib_string("ServerName"),"Hostname");

Now I realise I still need to update all 20 files with this - but I was going to have to do this anyway. But when I want to change it next time I can make the change in the controller in the run-time settings, rather than having to open each file in turn, make the change and then save it.

Okay, I understand it's a little win - but it's just made my day so much easier.