[ale] Automated testing cluster?

[DJ-Pfulio]

On 05/29/2015 02:28 PM, Robert L. Harris wrote:
>   I'm working with a team trying to prove out an environment build.  To do
> such we need to have about 40 'clients' connect to a web service, walk some
> web pages ( semi-randomly ) and report response times.
> 
>   I obviously don't want to set up 40 laptops and get interns, anyone know
> a good service, that's not expensive I can script through ( curl+expect
> could work if I could get a VM infrastructure out quick enough ) to just
> run the test scenario twice?  This isn't very indepth or a long project so
> there's not real point in bringing in something heavy or a consulting firm
> to build something out for us.
> 
>   Any recommendations?
> 
Apache has a load testing tool that I've used for simple websites - ab. Used it
to act like 1-200 clients - learned on the LAN 200 clients wasn't an issue. Over
the WAN, 50 clients was a problem.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html Took me about 20 min to learn
enough about this. Pretty graphs.

There are testing tools for this.  Different development environments have their
own - RoR uses Cucumber, for example. There are others too, but Cucumber is the
most popular last time I looked. Not too hard to learn.
 Perl has an entire subset of testing for web stuff.  I suspect Python does too.

For websites, these testing tools are inter-operable, after all, webpages are
webpages. It isn't hard to use a ruby test tool on perl or python website.  You
don't need separate clients to have a client machine "act" like a separate
client. The testing tools do this.

And if there is any javascript/ajax that needs to be part of the testing, then
you really want to use one of these tools.