JMeter Drupal Proxy URLS to exclude

I often use jmeter to load test drupal websites. One of the first things I need to do is capture a sample browsing session over the site using the jmeter proxy.

When I'm capturing a sample browsing session I usually don't want to grab all the embedded files since that makes for a very large set of http client requests in the thread group. At this point I want the thread group to contain just the top level URLs I actually clicked on but I want the individual entries to have "Retrieve All Embedded Resources" to be clicked.

That will increase the CPU load on the jmeter instances at runtime (they need to parse the downloaded file to extract the resources). I'm happy to make that trade for now. If it becomes a problem I'll adjust to have the embedded resources pre-extracted at proxy capture time but for most jmeter jobs I've done I haven't had to worry about test time CPU load much.

I always forget what the URL exclude patterns should look like. This is posted so I'll find it later.

Drupal sometimes adds GET parameters to URLs even for "static" resources such as css or png files. I haven't gone through to figure out which resources can have GET parameters added to them, instead, when excluding embedded/static resources I just treat them all similarly:

.*\.gif(\?.*|)
.*\.jpg(\?.*|)
.*\.png(\?.*|)
.*\.css(\?.*|)
.*\.js(\?.*|)

etc.