Load testing

This testing strategy consists of simulating a specified number of user, all of them using your application at the same time and at normal human speed.

What is load testing?

You can use the GGC to test your application during development to see how it would behave in conditions in a production environment. This can help you identify, for example, server (e.g. how many servers, how much memory, etc.) and network requirements based on the number of anticipated users. Observations made under these test conditions will also show up the application's weaknesses and will allow you to fix them before release.

Load testing with Ghost Client

The GGC allows you to specify several options through the Launcher class for load testing:

The thread_number option allows you to set the number of users to simulate, one thread representing one user.
The thread_delay option allows you to set a delay between each user's connection. In a real life situation where, for example, a thousand users could potentially launch an application, the likelihood of them all connecting at the exact same time is quite remote, so the thread delay option helps you to recreate a more real life situation.
You can specify the number of threads (users) and the thread delay using the command line switches when launching tests. As shown in the example below, the GGC will launch the IntegrityTestsSessionManager with 3 users, allowing a 3 second delay between each launch.

java com.fourjs.ggc.Launcher -s com.fourjs.ggc.testcases.IntegrityTestsSessionManager -u http://localhost:6394/ua/r/gwc-demo -t 3 -td 3

Developing Scenario for load testing

The Scenario for load testing needs to reflect how a real user would use an application. For example, the setDelay() method can be set to make the GhostRunner instance wait for a specified number of seconds between each action. This allows you to try to reproduce the human speed of interaction with an application, which is usually much slower than computer speed. Apart from that any interaction a user would normally do on an application can be played.

Performance testing

Performance testing is similar to load testing as it also consists of simulating a significant number of users but the aim is to determine when the system's performance will start to degrade. So, in this case you would specify the number of simulated user as high as possible so as to observe when the request/response delay begins to be affected by the number of users.