[LRUG] API automation / load testing

[John Arundel]

On 29 Jun 2012, at 17:53, Stephen Bartholomew wrote:
> 
> What about using ab (apache benchmark)?

+1

I've also used httperf, and autobench (a wrapper allowing you to co-ordinate httperf attacks from a whole bunch of machines). I usually find that I'll exhaust the outbound bandwidth of my load-generator machine well before I hit capacity on the server I'm testing, so a distributed autobench setup is useful in this situation.

You can generate realistic user sessions by taking snippets of your web logs and using httperf to replay them (for example, logging in as a test user, viewing some product pages, adding some items to your shopping cart, going to the checkout - stuff that exercises the whole stack and generates database writes). I find this often gives very different (and sometimes alarming) results compared to simply fetching the home page a million times.

Regards,
John
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