Is anyone doing sytem/load/performance testing with either of these two tools:
or
?
Not really. I did a lot of in-depth testing with JMeter, which allows you to capture sample traffic and replay it against the server, and with ab, which just hammers one page. Both excellent tools.
I suspect Selenium must be really interesting, but it brings in all the performance factors of the web browser itself. The browser engines are tuned for user experience, not fast (and stable) performance. Have you used it? How does it fare?
I suspect Selenium must be really interesting, but it brings in all the performance factors of the web browser itself. The browser engines are tuned for user experience, not fast (and stable) performance. Have you used it? How does it fare?
I've not used either in anger as yet but was intrigued by these for a few reasons. I've been toying with Ruby which Watir uses as to create a domain specific language for testing, I've long felt that automated testing was unjustly the black sheep of the software development family, In a previous life I had some training in ridiculously expensive (yet strangely rather shoddy) proprietary tools that used this approach and finally, I thought such tools could perhaps allow non-coders in the community another meaningful avenue to contribute to Moodle.
Watir is currently Windows only (Windows Internet Explorer only to be exact) which is a massive barrier for me. But it is apparently moving towards supporting Firefox cross-platform and also going to make use of Selenium (which independantly gets good very write-ups in it's own right).
Both tools are primarily for functional/smoke testing and any performance/load testing info they give is probably broad-brush but effectively free if you've already invested for other reasons. I think they could give broad confidence that low-level changes aren't breaking fundamental functionality though I'm unsure of what level of detail you could test before hitting diminishing returns.
Hi David and Martín,
interesting links. I didn't use them but I will probably integrate one of them or mimic part of it in a small "server stress tool". Maybe one of these will be able to replace my small program.
In the begining of the semester I had many fiability and performance problems with my cheap slow windows server after upgrading with xampp ( not suited for production site). Then I decided to make that small Visual Basic
program to stress the server and to see if all requests are completed by the server, even if it is slow.
The program simulate 25 requests from the same user and show in 25 internet explorer windows ( a massive attack for David
) the results. It is possible to scroll each page to verify the resulting page. It indicate also the total time for the 25 requests.
With Penny and Martín statistics integrated in 1.6 dev it will be interesting to stress and tune the servers.
Thanks for the 2 links.
Bernard
Another similar tool that uses Python to control apps via accessibility code:
It's really more aimed at Linux desktop apps, but you can drive web apps via the Epiphany browser.