Erk, Avalanche is not as nice as I originally thought. It seems that it tries too hard to keep an average load rate. When responses take too long to return, it sends out more requests. The end result is that it overloads the application server. Damn it, why can’t someone write a testing tool that sends out requests at a specified rate. Oh, hang on, that’s what Thumper is supposed to do. Better get off my ass ….
#1 by Bernd Eckenfels on 1 July 2008 - 2:37 am
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Apache JMeter has a constant rate time. However it wont back-off. But you can size the thread pool accordingly, so you will never get more parallel requests than threads configured. Since the fixed-rate timer cant sleep negative time, its quite safe…
Bernd
#2 by Tom on 1 July 2008 - 4:12 pm
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JMeter is a good tool, but the problem in my experience is that it is still possible to stop JMeter from sending requests by asking it to do things like large file uploads, thus blocking each thread. It is only an edge case, but when doing destructive testing, you really want to keep on sending requests, no matter what the state of the server is.
I know that I’m being really pedantic here, but the blocking calls made by JMeter trouble me, as does scaling up using threads. Nervertheless I’ll keep on using Grinder and JMeter till I stop being distracted by shiny things and finish off Thumper.