What is Pacing? Where/why to use it?

Pacing is the time which will hold/pause the script before it goes to next  iteration. i.e Once the Action iteration is completed the script will wait for the specific time(pacing time) before it starts the next one. It works between two actions. eg, if we record a script there will be three default actions generated by the Load Runner: vuser_init, Action and vuser_end, the pacing will work after the Action block and hold the script before it goes to repeat it.

The default blocks generated by LoadRunner is shown below:

Actions marked in Red

Now we know what is pacing and we use it between two iteration. The next question comes to mind is why we use pacing:

Pacing is used to:

• To control the number of TPS generated by an user.
• To control number of hits on a application under test.

   

Types of Pacing:

There are three options to control the pacing in a script:

General Pacing: 

 1. As soon as the previous iteration ends:

 Loadrunner starts the next iteration as soon as possible after the previous iteration ends.

2. After the previous iteration ends:

In this Loadrunner starts each new iteration after a specified amount of time, the end of the previous iteration. We can either give an exact number of seconds or a range of time.

3.  At fixed intervals

In this we can specify the time between iteration either a fixed number of seconds or a range of seconds from the beginning of the previous iteration. The next scheduled iteration will only begin when the previous iteration is complete. 

Below example will explain how it works: