Ruby replacement for ab?

Ruby
21

On 12/22/06, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

WebTest, from my cursory look, seems to be more oriented at validating the
correctness of a web site/application than stress testing, though. Did I
miss something?

If you want more complex interactions than JMeter provides, there’s
no reason you can’t create WebTest scripts and set off multiple copies
running simultaneously. But no, it’s not intrinsically designed for
stress
testing.

22

On Sat, 23 Dec 2006, Hassan S. wrote:

On 12/22/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:

… As far as I know, there are no open source tools
that have the flexibility in script capture these tools have.
Essentially, you fire up a script recorder, it fires up a browser, you
exercise your app, you close the recorder and it generates a script.

Perhaps you missed my prior post about WebTest and associated
WebTestRecorder? :slight_smile: Yes, it’s Java, but if you’re considering JMeter…

WebTest, from my cursory look, seems to be more oriented at validating
the
correctness of a web site/application than stress testing, though. Did
I
miss something?

Kirk H.

23

On Sat, 23 Dec 2006, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

I realize I sound like a salesman for a couple of rather expensive tools –
if that offends the denizens of this open source list, well, I’m sorry. As I
said before, if somebody wants to go out and build an open source tool in
Ruby that does industrial strength load and scalability testing, I’ll be very
encouraging, at least with “moral support”. But it’s a big job – it’s not as
simple as it looks. It’s certainly more than I’d be willing to take on as a
one-man open source hacker.

I think there is a LARGE amount of room in between ab and an open
source,
feature complete competitor for SilkPerformer for something that fills a
niche and is useful, yet manageable as an open source project.

Kirk H.

24

Hassan S. wrote:

running simultaneously. But no, it’s not intrinsically designed for
stress
testing.

OK … let’s get our definitions straight.

  1. QA/Correctness testing: if I enter request A, does the web app return
    the correct response? If I buy a gizmo, does the database show one less
    gizmo available to the next buyer? Can Joe Visitor log in and read
    Francine User’s credit card numbers?

  2. Stress test: how gracelessly does the web app behave under an
    attempted DoS attack?

  3. Load and scalability testing: Assuming it returns the correct
    responses, what kind of realistic user load can the web app and its
    servers sustain? Where are the bottlenecks? Are they software or
    hardware? If software, how can I fix them? How can I inform my designers
    how to do things better the next time? If it’s hardware, what kind of
    hardware? Network? Disk? Server?

Number 3 presupposes you’ve done Number 1! In fact, the load test
scripts must, to be valid, check the data coming back from the
application to make sure the response is correct. In any event,
SilkPerformer and LoadRunner are specifically designed and evolved to do
3. I didn’t dig into Web Test to see if it could be made to do 3 or how
much effort would be involved, since it doesn’t record IE. Considering
how long SilkPerformer and LoadRunner have been around, I rather doubt
that Web Test has the kind of “industrial strength” load and scalability
testing capabilities.

I realize I sound like a salesman for a couple of rather expensive tools
– if that offends the denizens of this open source list, well, I’m
sorry. As I said before, if somebody wants to go out and build an open
source tool in Ruby that does industrial strength load and scalability
testing, I’ll be very encouraging, at least with “moral support”. But
it’s a big job – it’s not as simple as it looks. It’s certainly more
than I’d be willing to take on as a one-man open source hacker.

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.

25

[email protected] wrote:

I think there is a LARGE amount of room in between ab and an open
source, feature complete competitor for SilkPerformer for something
that fills a niche and is useful, yet manageable as an open source
project.
Yes … there is indeed. And Ruby seems to me to be the ideal language
to create such tools with. There actually wouldn’t be a need at all for
load test tools if the application designers were enabled and encouraged
to build load testing into the application when it was being designed,
rather than as an afterthought a few months before deployment, or even
worse, after deployment.

So … we have test-driven development and we have behavior-driven
development and we have “software performance engineering”. Why not
“benchmark-driven development” too? It should be easy, for example, to
write something in RSpec like “this web page should display the shopping
cart withing five seconds”.

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.