just trying to understand the best practice for allocating vusers to user paths via populations. we have converted our first full application for load testing to neoload from a different load test software and are trying to perform our first baseline tests. so the numbers listed below may not be what I should be using or I may not be allocating the vusers in a sensible way. or both..?
I have 8 user paths that perform various url calls. I setup 3 different populations for the user paths.
under populations I have all 8 user paths belonging to 1 of the 3 populations. each set with a rough % of the total vusers being used to equate to the correct number of vusers as closely as a % can with the numbers being used in our previous software. the following represents the allocation im currently using:
population #1 - 22 vusers
test #1 - 48% ~10.56 vusers (prev software 10 vusers)
test #2 - 13% ~2.86 vusers (prev software 3 vusers)
test #3 - 13% ~2.86 vusers (prev software 3 vusers)
test #4 - 13% ~2.86 vusers (prev software 3 vusers)
test #5 - 13% ~2.86 vusers (prev software 3 vusers)
population #2 - 13 vusers
test #1 - 70% ~9.1 vusers (prev software 9 vusers)
test #2 - 30% ~3.9 vusers (prev 4 users)
population #3 - 6 vusers
test #1 - 100% same for both
so in a scenario such as this how does neoload equate % such as this to real vuser allocation? if neoload is allocated say 4.6 vusers for a specific user path via the % of the population. does that mean it is using 4.6 vusers for that user path over time? or does that mean it is allocating 4 vusers for that user path over time and the .6 is just lost?
my suspicion is I need to have 8 populations in this scenario. or in any scenario where the % does not line up cleanly with the number of vusers to allocate. but I just want to make sure that is the case before telling my group that.