From: khaines@...
Date: 2006-12-22T08:16:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby replacement for ab?

On Fri, 22 Dec 2006, Fred Wulff wrote:

> It seems like it would be fairly easy to set up something with
> WWW::Mechanize, although there might be performance problems if you
> wanted to use it for stress testing.

Yeah, possibly.  Mechanize or hpricot could be part of a solution, but the 
real challenge is in devising a DSL that makes it _easy_ for me to, for 
example:

1) Hit the homepage.

2) Go to a random URL on the site.
    Repeat 2-5 times.

3) Go to the fund information page.

4  Click through to the distributions display.

5)  Randomly select 1-4 fund information links.

Repeat 100000 times, collecting timing information, failure information, 
etc....



Then, if I can run that on two or three machines at the same time, and can 
collate their logs and run an analysis on the collated logs, I'd be a 
happy fellow.

Another thing that I'd love to be able to do is to run something like the 
above set of actions, but do it more slowly, with pauses between each 
request, so that the site may only get, on average, one request a second 
but I can let it run for days.

I have encountered failures on occasion that didn't seem to happen as a 
result of short term heavy loading, but more as a result of steady hits 
over a longer period of time.

I'd like to be able to easily simulate that usage pattern in a development 
environment.


Kirk Haines