msautotest/regression testing question

[Norman Barker]

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU]On
Behalf Of Frank Warmerdam
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 2:13 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] msautotest/regression testing
question


On 8/24/05, Gambin Dejan <Dejan.Gambin at pula.hr> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I suppose this question is mostly intended to Frank but maybe someone
> else can answer too.
> 
> I would like how this thing is working and can it be used (at least
> partially) to help me implement some kind of benchmarking that would
> simulate a number of simultaneous visitors doing the map actions
> (zooming, panning, activating/deactivating layers, querying, etc.).
> 
> This would help me decide on hardware requirements and especially the
> Internet bandwidth that I need to lease form my ISP.

Dejan, 

I don't think the msautotest provides a very good example
of how to simulate use loading.   It mostly uses shp2img,
avoiding some of the issues related to mapserv running
as a cgi, bandwidth issues, etc. 

If you have your application working already, and you 
just want to  test it under load, I would suggest operating
it interactively, and capturing the set of requests from 
the Apache logfile.  You can then play back the request
series, perhaps with several parallel streams of requests
to simulate load. 

I'm not sure what the best way is to determine bandwidth
requirements.  A rough estimate could be collected from the
byte counts reported in the apache log file for a given 
series of requests.  

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent

Hi,

I use JMeter when I want to test a server application, mainly because it is simple :-), and it gives you a nice pretty picture to show the boss :-) , this is summarised here http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/usermanual/boss.html

I like it because it gives a repeatable test against a series of URL queries, and you can test concurrent users which is the test that breaks most servers if the hardware is incorrectly specified.

Norman