Forum OpenACS Q&A: What HTTP load testing tools do people like?

I have several people in Japan that are interested in doing load
testing on production prototypes for ACS or openACS based sites
(AOLserver). Can anyone tell me if there are web traffic simulators
that they have had good experience with, or can recommend? Free-
software ones are preferred, of course.
I have found, for the lowend, that wget is useful.  Use the recursive option to have it go through every page and grab stuff.

There is also at least one tool that will read your server logs and replay the same requests - so your testing can be focused on exactly the same kind of usage you are already seeing on the site.

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Posted by Henry Minsky on
Sorry, the question was actually from me, not Rolf...

Anyway, I found a good resource at http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html#LOAD, including a nice simple C program called http_load from the always reliable ACME software.

Ya know, I don't think I've ever seen Henry and Rolf in the same place at the same time.  hmmmmm.....
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Posted by David Walker on
By chance does one wear glasses but not the other?
If you are looking for something that also tests the functional behavior of web applications and is able to simulate more complex user interactions then you may want to take a look at the tclwebtest project. It provides a tcl api for writing tests on web apps.

It is far from being finished, but already usable to do some basic testing on ACS-like sites. I want to add some simple stress testing capabilities soon and would appreciate suggestions on how to do that. Although - if you need something that works _right now_ then it is propably not an alternative.

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Posted by Don Baccus on
This looks like an interesting start at a tool for doing regression testing.  How soon do you expect to have some output formatting stuff other than today's stack trace (I'm assuming the page you pointed us to is up-to-date?).

Would you be interested in writing up a handful of examples for some basic OpenACS 4 pages?

Well, the page still is not really up to date - actually there are some improvements on the output formatting and a draft document describing the new features.

The two pieces of httpunit regression testing in ACS 4 that I found - in the templating and the wp-slim package - have been ported from httpunit to tclwebtest and it works so far for me (on an ACS4 Classic system), although these ports are not done in the ideal way (unorganized, one big file instead of a few smaller ones, etc.) The ported tests are in the distribution.

I will do some smaller examples on OpenACS pages soon.

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Posted by Don Baccus on
That would be great - and greatly appreciated.
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Posted by Henry Minsky on
Here's a picture of Rolf at Oiso beach in Kanagawa http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/hqm/japan/photos/rolf-beach.jpg
OpenSTA http://www.opensta.org , it is much better than Microsoft WAS.

-klaus

I tried Neoload (http://www.neotys.com) that is an easy to use load testing tool.
Hope this helps.
Fred.
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Posted by Nick Carroll on
You might want to try Selenium (http://selenium.thoughtworks.com/index.html). Great for testing functionality from a user perspective.
Hi, guys!
I use Selenium for testing WEB application and I have a one problem: I didn't find the way for creating virtual(concurrent) users, which will simultaneously connect to the application. If somebody knows how I can resolve my problem - plese send on my e-mail mailto:yermashka@hotmail.com corresponding document or link.
Best regards, Maria.
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Posted by Tariq Shaheb on
Testing tools like OpenSTA, jmeter do people like.
Even QA Load people do like..