LoadSun - proposal of a tool to generate workloads on web applications
Victor dos Santos Costa · 2019
The Quality of Service (QoS) of Web applications is usually measured by metrics such as response time, throughput, and availability. Low QoS translates into frustrated customers, which can lead to missed business opportunities. One way to assess application behavior is through performance testing, which allows us to evaluate how Web applications support the expected workload by emulating customer behavior at different load levels. Performance tests can prove difficult (not to say impossible) to be run without using some kind of automation tool. The main way to automate performance tests is through workload generators, which emulate synthetic customer behavior, by creating and managing virtual users. This term paper project presents a workload generator for Web-based applications, prioritizing the phases of analysis, design, implementation and evaluation. The proposal is called LoadSun, and its main focus is to be a lightweight tool that can be used by undergraduates and to be integrable with other modules such as a performance testing Domain-Specific Language and a performance testing monitoring tool. For the accomplishment of the analysis and the design an empirical research on performance testing tools was carried out, in the form of a systematic literature map, resulting not only in the proposed tool, but in the elaboration of a complete taxonomy of performance testing tools. LoadSun’s presented design contains the necessary requirements, an abstraction of the architecture, and the major design decisions that were taken together with the reasoning behind them. An insight in the implementation of the tool and its peculiarities is given. An experimental benchmark was conducted to evaluate and compare LoadSun with one of the industry’s leading open-source performance testing tools. Finally, the results of the benchmark and the final conclusions are discussed, as well as new topics for future works.