[LRUG] Load testing Rails apps

[Elise Huard]

I can certainly recommend Tsung.  It has very good replay
functionality, and is relatively simple to use IMHO.
ab is great to loadtest just one URL.
I realize I'm not adding much to what Gareth said :)

Elise

On 21 September 2011 17:12, gareth rushgrove <gareth.rushgrove at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 September 2011 20:51, Alan Buxton <alanbuxton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all
>>
>> So it feels a bit strange to make a tech posting to the list … but here
>> goes. It’s an echo of a previous question that instigated the e-petitions
>> team coming in to talk to LRUG last week. I really the enjoyed the talk and
>> was totally inspired by Alan Thomas’s jmeter piece to have a look at jmeter.
>> The load/performance testing I do is either (a) manual, (b) based on looking
>> for weaknesses using something like New Relic or (c) uses proprietary tools.
>> So an open source option sounded great.
>>
>> A quick look at jmeter though and it says that it doesn’t execute
>> javascript. This is at the same time that Rails apps seem to be using more
>> and more javascript. Github, for example, seems to be deciding that my Rails
>> apps are written in Javascript rather than Ruby.
>>
>
> The answer is "it depends on your application", but their are ways of
> making it work either way.
>
> To frame the conversation, when I'm talking about Load testing I'm not
> talking about measuring the performance seen by individual browsers,
> but the impact of more traffic on the application as a whole.
>
> Because javascript is executed on the client for the majority of
> applications it's going to have no impact at all. The main exception
> here is if that javascript triggers requests to the server. The
> easiest way of dealing with that is using log replay based on real
> data, because the logs will have those requests in (e.g. an auto
> compete search triggering several requests). Jmeter supports log
> replay, as do other tools (e.g.
> http://www.igvita.com/2008/09/30/load-testing-with-log-replay)
>
>> 2.       What other open source tools are there out there that are worth
>> looking at?
>>
>
> I'd say it's worth looking at a few different tools depending on your
> requirements and what you want in your tool box. I'd break them down
> into some groups:
>
> ApacheBench and HTTperf are are great for simple, quick, fire and
> forget tests. I'd definitely learn one of them - they provide a very
> simple way of sanity checking things. Lots of folks then script
> runners or results collectors around them.
>
> Tsung, Siege, Bees with Machine Guns - More heavy duty from my limited
> experience, Tsung certainly takes a bit of setup and configuration
> (XML and Erlang) but provides a hugely powerful distributed load
> testing capability. I've spoken to folks at Nokia who use it across
> massive clusters with great success.
>
> Jmeter, Funkload - grouping these (and presumably other tools) as
> somewhere in the middle of load testing and functional testing. Both
> make it very easy to write functional tests that exercise your
> application features, and then scale out the requests for a load test.
> Both also provide good ways of visualising the results which makes
> analysing results easier when you know what you're looking at.
>
> G
>
>
>
> --
> Gareth Rushgrove
> Web Geek
>
> morethanseven.net
> garethrushgrove.com
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