Journal
| Title | WebGauge: An Agent-based Stress Testing Tool with Performance Data Visualization Targeted at Web Applications Posted by Dante Dinawanao |
| Authors | De la Cruz, Michael; Labrador, Jeyran; Dinawanao, Dante |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Journal | Philippine Information Technology Journal |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 13-19 |
| Publisher | Computing Society of the Philippines (CSP) and Philippine Society of Information Technology Educators (PSITE) |
| Abstract | WebGauge is an agent-based tool designed for stress-testing web applications written in PHP and Erlang. It accepts a sequence of HTTP requests, obtained from a recorded session of a user accessing a particular web-based application, and then 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, WebGauge monitors resource utilization (e.g., memory, network, CPU) of the target application server while 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, WebGauge displays performance data via tabular summaries and visually plotted in charts for analysis. In this study, two web applications built by software engineering students were subjected to stress-testing using WebGauge. A side-by-side comparison was then made with existing stresstesting tools namely, httperf, WAPT and Tsung, in order to show the strength and weaknesses of WebGauge over them. Results show that WebGauge alone can provide replayable motion charts for the consolidated web server utilization reports and web pages and queries frequency and can display reports for all specified performance criteria with corresponding visualizations. Webgauge and Tsung are capable of distributing the tasks that allows them to provide large number of simultanueous HTTP requests while WAPT and httperf are limited to the capacity of their host system. Also, httperf, Tsung and WAPT can control the frequency of requests while Webgauge relies on the configured interval of each agent and the think-time for each request. Through the stress tests conducted WebGauge stress testing tool was proved to be able to push the test applications to its limit and collected the utilization and performance data which was presented into summarized tables with corresponding charts based on the desired performance criteria. |
| Index terms / Keywords | stress test, software agents, web ap-plication, concurrency, distribution |
| URL | https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxwaG5jaXRlfGd4OjJjOGZkZWRhNjlhMTE0YzY |