When I was doing load testing we

-wrote a client to simulate the real client as much as possible, with delays
and things where appropriate client side

-had the main() routine take #threads and #iterations as params, among
others

-output the results in basic CSV format, with the timestamp of each call at
the beginning

-<java> invoked this in an ant build file that slowly ramped up the load:
1-5-10-20-30-50-100 threads, same 1000 iterations

-set this build file up to run on 5 different machines over night, all with
clocks in sync

in the am we'd come in and get the CSV files, merge them, strip out the lead
in and lead out of each iteration and then work out the average round trip
time under the different loads, which was then xformed into a graph of
response time vs load, showing where we came in under the 2s limit the SLA
demanded.

It all worked well, but proper tools might be nice too. There is something
in jakarta for this; The book Extreme Programming in Java with open source
tools (hightower and liesieki) cover it.

One thing we added early on was server side logging of the interval between
aspects of the service: parse and sanitise, external URL fetch, render, save
file, and returned these with the rest of the result. So you not only see
how long things took, but identify issues. If external url fetching was
slow, it meant the net connections in the cluster were off, for example. A
bit of a breakdown is invaluable. You could do this in Axis with handlers.

-steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Roy Wood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, November 29, 2002 12:30
Subject: Performance Testing?


> Anyone here have suggestions as to generating some semi-relevant
> performance numbers for a SOAP service?
>
> Any recommended tools out there, or should I just roll my own?
>
> All I'm looking for is some rough idea as to what sort of client
> transaction load my app/server can support.
>
>
> -Roy
>

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