Hi fellow hard workers,

Good to have this discussion, I can learn from my peers. I will argue for 
Jmeter below. I am certain it is a viable tool, however, I am not saying that 
tsung is not also a viable tool. I want to make a fair comparison, so need to 
note some differences in emphasis.

In terms of maintainability, it is important for stress tests to be as simple 
as is possible and  data driven. It does not matter which technology you use if 
you don't follow conventions and basic design patterns.

> I much prefer handling this programatically,

I found it straightforward to mentor a functional administrator to stress test 
using Jmeter. The GUI to create tests with its reverse proxy is not difficult 
to explain. True: The plans are saved in a more complex than Tsung XML 
format.In terms of recording tests i tend to use badboy 
(http://www.badboy.com.au/), save in Jmeter format and tweak. Give it a go.
Jmeter has lots of assertions including reglex. You simply add the assertions 
as children under the http samplers.

> Dynamic Variables - again it's jmeter's Bean Shell PreProcessor workflow vs 
> tsung's regexp param in the http request XML

You can use dynamic variables in Jmeter as well. Here are the list of functions 
to use in any sampler and the definition of variables.
http://jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/functions.html

If all this wiring is not enough, then you can fall back to the beanshell.  At 
this point you are moving away from KISS and that should be a warning about 
maintainability.

There is a working example of a framework of Jmeter in CLE land which can work 
with CLE, Hybrid and extended to OAE. This will allow us to share data models 
across communities. If later some one wishes to move to a hybrid instance then 
they can leverage there knowledge from CLE land. Now, it is true that this is 
currently not a reality (as Lance fairly pointed out), however, if we plough 
the land then seeds can grow.

There are plenty of examples of Jmeter used at large scale with a large number 
of developers. It has a well established community.

Here is a book on the subject:
http://www.packtpub.com/beginning-apache-jmeter/book

Here are some links:
http://wiki.apache.org/jmeter/JMeterLinks/

Here is a cloud service:
http://blazemeter.com/

Jmeters main weakness is that it does not understand JavaScript easily. 
Selenium webdriver with Qunit is the way forward for that.

Looking forward to a detailed response.

Alan




Alan Berg

Group Education and Research Services
Central Computer Services
University of Amsterdam
________________________________
From: [email protected] 
[[email protected]] on behalf of Kyle Campos 
[[email protected]]
Sent: 17 July 2012 03:25
To: Branden Visser
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [oae-dev] Load testing tool

Branden,

I'll just jump into the technical reasons I see jmeter being more difficult to 
work with from a community perspective. Really you touched on it in your 
positive point #2 for Tsung and that's Tsung's XML structure. But the 
implications of this deserve more highlight especially in the context of the 
community requirement for automated/nightly performance tests.

What I don't like about jmeter is primarily its GUI dependency and the 
implications of it on workflow, extensibility, collaboration etc... It makes 
for really slow test development with large use cases and more difficult 
maintenance/collaboration between teams. Concrete examples below...

    1. AJAX request handling - I don't think they could have made it any more 
convoluted with their "logic controller". Using logic "wizards" in a GUI is 
just ugly and makes me cringe. I much prefer handling this programatically, 
which is what I did in tsung and what our abstraction layer makes really easy 
and transparent to test writers. If you want the pain, then go through jmeter's 
GUI workflow for developing the logic around username lookup on signup, then 
factor in dynamic substitution with reading in usernames from an external file, 
now think about how easy it would be for someone else to change this logic at 
runtime. Ick.

    There's 1 place that controls this in my tsung framework. You don't need to 
go through this pain at all writing test cases, and even if you built it from 
scratch it's very simple.

    2. Dynamic Variables - again it's jmeter's Bean Shell PreProcessor workflow 
vs tsung's regexp param in the http request XML. And again this is also wrapped 
in our framework.

Both of the above examples will be in heavy use in any good OAE performance 
test.

I think your point about releasing performance tests as an artifact with the 
release is good in principle, but I don't see jmeter being the best vehicle to 
deliver those. As a deployer myself I'd much rather the community provide a 
tagged API set that I can leverage to build that profile MY use cases(our tsung 
framework is built with that in mind). I don't want a set of static scripts 
that may or may not execute in my environment and that may or may not profile 
anything of use for my implementation. There's no way the community can know 
those things or build performance tests that address all those use cases.

I've gone through this technology selection with a more broad set of 
requirements than most folks who use jmeter need. jmeter is a very common 
developer tool to quickly script up a simple performance test. I've never seen 
it used very successfully in a broad context with many devs contributing, with 
it running complex use cases, against a young code base and it being 
maintainable over time. That being said, you are all very talented and I'm sure 
you could get it to work for you, but I'd be very careful that you don't paint 
yourself into a corner with burdensome maintenance and test development 
workflow that limits contribution.

My $0.02

-Kyle

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 4:42 AM, Branden Visser 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi everyone,

I've been putting some research into an appropriate load testing tool
for us to use, I have been focusing mainly on JMeter and Tsung.

Tsung, as far as I can tell, has the following selling points:

1. Its erlang guts let it drive many concurrent users more efficiently
than its competitors
2. Its XML structure seems quite leaner, making it easier build tests
from source
3. There is existing work from rSmart that can be leveraged to drive
our performance tests [1]

With JMeter, I see the following benefits:

1. Lower overhead in spinning up a test, once the tests are already
built (VIA a maven plugin)
2. I think the increase in complexity of JMeter comes with the benefit
of extensibility (unless you know erlang, I guess..)
3. There is an existing community effort that can be leveraged to
drive our performance tests [2]

They both have exactly 3 advantages, I don't know what to do!?

Just kidding. But, unless there is quantifiable evidence that suggests
JMeter's performance will not suffice to properly test OAE (I have not
been able to find such evidence yet, but others may have more data), I
propose that we move forward with JMeter. I see value in making the
JMeter tests executable from the same command-line on which OAE is
built. I think this moves towards making the JMeter tests an artifact
of the release and not some orthogonal set of scripts uploaded
elsewhere, which in my experience tend to become of questionable age
and relevance. I think it will become more valuable to our deployers,
and the deployers' performance test data (which would hopefully be
more abundant with the lower barrier of entry) will become more
valuable to the core team.

[1] https://github.com/kcampos/Open-Performance-Automation-Framework
[2] https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/QA/CLE+Load+Test+Framework

--
Cheers,
Branden
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--
Kyle Campos
Director of Quality Operations / rSmart
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
skype: kyle.campos
phone: 623-455-6180
GTalk: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

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