> If ever what I do messes up stress testing - I hope people let me know. My >intention > is to add functional testing capabilities as needed without degrading the stress >testing > capabilities. Thus, I am willing to come up short in functional testing, but not in >stress > testing.
Some information on the reasons why I believe those products which do good functional testing fail to be good at load testing: 1.- They generally try to test page functionality as a whole, including the effect of JavaScript code in the pages and, often, issues which depend on the rendering engine, such as the accessibility of form fields. As it turns out, there's only one reliable way to do this, which is to include the browser itself as part of the test runtime -- so that the JavaScript code is run by the actual browser and not by some "simulation" code in the test tool. This makes the test tool tremendously heavy in terms of resource needs -- a machine can't usually run more than half a dozen such browsers without significant performance penalties. Which means you would need 100 machines to simulate 1000 users hitting your system :-( 2.- Even if they stay away from testing JavaScript & rendering features, functional test scripts still tend to be (and probably need to be) expressed as: 1/ Get URL A. 2/ Click on the link with text T. 3/ Fill the three form fields in the resulting form with values x y z, then press button labelled "SUBMIT". which require parsing and analysis of the returned HTML. This is generally a costly operation, which plays against you when load testing. In contrast, the (current) JMeter way would be to do: 1/ Get URL A 2/ Get URL B. 2/ POST URL C with parameters X=x, Y=y, Z=z. which is not very good from a functional testing point of view, because it depends on knowledge of the URLs pointed to by "the link with text T" and "the action for the resulting form". Just hoping that this helps avoiding the same pitfalls. Salut, Jordi. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
