Journal
| Title | WebSurge: A Profile-Based Stress Testing Tool with Distributed User Agents for Web Applications Posted by Dante Dinawanao |
| Authors | de la Cruz, Michael; Labrador, Jeyran; Dinawanao, Dante |
| Publication date | 2016/7 |
| Journal | Journal of Computational Innovations and Engineering Applications |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 75-84 |
| Publisher | De La Salle University Publishing House |
| Abstract | WebSurge is a stress testing tool designed for web applications written in PHP and Erlang/OTP. It requires a third party sniffing tool to record the session of actual users while accessing a particular web-based application then translates it into a sequence of HTTP requests to form a user profile, and executes them in several instances using software agents, as if they were executed concurrently by real users. Also, the number of users to simulate requests and intervals can be configured according to your target end-user (e.g., a company with 1000 employees). Once started, WebSurge monitors resource utilization (e.g., memory, network, CPU) of the target application server at the same time, keeps track of each transaction performed inside the target application itself, like the execution of an SQL query or rendering a page. After which, the WebSurge displays the summarized performance data of the targeted web application. In this study, two web applications were subjected to stress-test using WebSurge to test its functionality. Also, a side-by-side comparison was made with existing stress-testing tools namely, httperf, WAPT and Tsung, in order to benchmark the strengths and weaknesses of WebSurge over them. The conducted stress tests with WebSurge stress testing tool had proven that it was capable of pushing the test applications to its limit and was able to collect the utilization and performance data which was presented into summarized tables based on the desired performance criteria. The benchmark results proved that among the stress testing tools WebSurge alone can provide dynamic profiles for user agents, WebSurge and Tsung were both capable of distributing the tasks that allowed them to provide large number of simultaneous HTTP user agents while WAPT and httperf were limited to the capacity of their host system. Consequently, httperf, Tsung and WAPT can control the frequency of requests while WebSurge used the configured interval of each agent and the think-time for each request. |
| Index terms / Keywords | stress test, software agents, web ap-plication, concurrency, distribution |
| URL | http://www.dlsu.edu.ph/offices/publishing-house/journals/jciea/JCIEA-Vol1-No1.pdf |