Ruby replacement for ab?

[khaines]

I realize I sound like a salesman for a couple of rather expensive tools --
if that offends the denizens of this open source list, well, I'm sorry. As I
said before, if somebody wants to go out and build an open source tool in
Ruby that does industrial strength load and scalability testing, I'll be very
encouraging, at least with "moral support". But it's a big job -- it's not as
simple as it looks. It's certainly more than I'd be willing to take on as a
one-man open source hacker.

I think there is a LARGE amount of room in between ab and an open source,
feature complete competitor for SilkPerformer for something that fills a
niche and is useful, yet manageable as an open source project.


Kirk Haines

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I think there is a LARGE amount of room in between ab and an open
source, feature complete competitor for SilkPerformer for something
that fills a niche and is useful, yet manageable as an open source
project.

Yes ... there is indeed. And Ruby seems to me to be the ideal language
to create such tools with. There actually wouldn't be a need at all for
load test tools if the application designers were enabled and encouraged
to build load testing into the application when it was being designed,
rather than as an afterthought a few months before deployment, or even
worse, after deployment.

So ... we have test-driven development and we have behavior-driven
development and we have "software performance engineering". Why not
"benchmark-driven development" too? It should be easy, for example, to
write something in RSpec like "this web page should display the shopping
cart withing five seconds".