Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Two models of load testing and corresponding tools

When a load testing is conducted, a tester first needs to decide what kind of workload should be applied, that is, load characterized by the number of clients or arrival rate (interarrival time) . For those who always use one tool for load testing, it is better to try other options to get different interpretation of system behaviors.

Tools specify the number of clients:
These two are both developed in Java. The most important parameter to be configured is the number of simulated users that will send requests to the server. The simulated concurrent users are natually mapped to Java threads. Both of them can specify thinking time of different distributions. A difference between them is that JMeter specifies how many rounds the request scenario will run and Faban specifies how long the test will run.

Tools specify the arrival rate:
Since the processes in Erlang are very light, new process can be spawned very fast and a machine can support thousands of Erlang processes without problem. This make it possible for Tsung to generate load of given interarrival time, while it is difficult for Java-based tools.

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