[LRUG] Load testing Rails apps

[Alan Buxton]

Hey guys - thanks for all the pointers.  Lots of interesting stuff to look
at.

All the best

a

-----Original Message-----
From: chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org [mailto:chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org] On
Behalf Of Elise Huard
Sent: 22 September 2011 13:51
To: London Ruby Users Group
Subject: Re: [LRUG] Load testing Rails apps

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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