Simulating User Interactions: A Model and Tool for Semi-realistic Load Testing of Social App Backend Web Services
Philipp Alexander Brüne · 2017
Many mobile apps today support interactions between their users and/or the provider within the app. Therefore, these apps commonly call a web service backend system hosted by the app provider. For the implementation of such service backends, load tests are required to ensure their performance and scalability. However, existing tools like JMeter are not able to simulate “out of the box” a load distribution with the complex time evolution of heterogeneous, real and interacting users of a social app, which e.g. would be necessary to detect critical performance bottlenecks. Therefore, in this paper a probabilistic model for simulating interacting users of a social app is proposed and evaluated by implementing it in a prototype load testing tool and using it to test a backend of new real-world social app currently under development.