Can I send multiple requests at one time using Fiddler? - service

Using Fiddler, I want to send multiple requests in one hit, to check the response time from the server, if too many requests are sent at one time. Basically, I want to perform a, kind of, load testing on my service. Is there any way to perform this action? I want to repeat the process of hitting the server, again and again.

In Fiddler, you can repeat a request as many times as you like by hitting SHIFT+R on the selected Web Session. You'll be prompted for a repeat count and then Fiddler will issue the specified number of requests.
Caveat: Having said that, generally speaking, you'd want to use a tool like Telerik Test Studio's Load Test tool for a task like this. Alternatively, you could use Fiddler's Export architecture to generate a script for VS WebTest or Microsoft's free WCAT tool and use those tools to generate the load. You can then run these scripts on multiple machines from multiple networks and generate a more-realistic set of load than you could by simply running on a single client.

I've been load testing with StresStimulus today. Overall, I'm quite impressed.
It's now a standalone application (it used to be a fiddler extension). There's a 7 day free trial which allows up to 50 virtual users. Also, the setup wizard is great for beginners.
For basic load testing the trial should be fine. Consider upgrading for extensive/professional use.

Related

How to make uchiwa dashboard url be able to adjust threshold?

me again..
I had done all the sensu-uchiwa-graphite set up. And i get a new request,:(. Rather than go to change the threshold in check.json file on sensu server..any plugin at the UCHIWA that this adjustment will be shown in Uchiwa dashboard? I asked because in case that my application teams wanna change it by themselves without accessing to server.
I think sensu-admin in enterprise is available but we need to pay big money per year ;(...
Thanks in advance to help.
Sumana W.
This is fairly doable if you use a configuration management system like Chef/Ansible/Puppet - especially if you run standalone checks on the sensu-client.
This allows the clients to define their own thresholds, rather than changing the sensu servers themselves.
See https://sensuapp.org/docs/latest/reference/checks.html#standalone-checks
In this case, the definitions for the checks are sitting on the client servers and they have the choice of their thresholds or configurations. The client itself manages how often to run the check and sends the output back to the server, rather than the server requesting the checks. This helps quite a bit as far as scaling or multitenancy.
The other way to accomplish this, if you are tied to serverside checks, would be to use client attributes (https://sensuapp.org/docs/0.25/reference/checks.html#check-token-substitution)
For example, you can have a cpu check that says something like check-cpu.sh -w :::cpu_warn::: -c :::cpu_critical::: and these come from a cpu_warn and cpu_critical value from the client.json on the client server.
Source: We use sensu extensively in an enterprise environment across thousands of hosts and have been working through these same issues.

What are the limitations of the flask built-in web server

I'm a newbie in web server administration. I've read multiple times that flask built-in web server is not designed for "production", and must be used only for tests and debug...
But what if my app touchs only a thousand users who occasionnaly send data to the server ?
If it works, when will I have to bother with the configuration of a more sophisticated web server ? (I am looking for approximative metrics).
In a nutshell, I would love to find what the builtin web server can do (with approx thresholds) and what it cannot.
Thanks a lot !
There isn't one right answer to this question, but here are some things to keep in mind:
With the right amount of horizontal scaling, it is quite possible you could keep scaling out use of the debug server forever. When exactly you would need to start scaling (or switch to using a "real" web server) would also depend on the environment you are hosting in, the expectations of the users, etc.
The main issue you would probably run into is that the server is single-threaded. This means that it will handle each request one at a time, serially. This means that if you are trying to serve more than one request (including favicons, static items like images, CSS and Javascript files, etc.) the requests will take longer. If any given requests happens to take a long time (say, 20 seconds) then your entire application is unresponsive for that time (20 seconds). This is only the default, of course: you could bump the thread counts (or have requests be handled in other processes), which might alleviate some issues. But once again, it can still be slow under a "high" load. What is considered a "high" load will be dependent on your application and the expectations of a maximum acceptable response time.
Another issue is security: if you are concerned at ALL about security (and not just the security of the data in the application itself, but the security of the box that will be running it as well) then you should not use the development server. It is not ready to withstand any sort of attack.
Finally, the development server could just fail outright. It is not designed to be used as a long-running process (days, weeks, months), and so it has not been well tested to work in this capacity.
So, yes, it has limitations. Yes, you could still conceivably use it in production. And yes, I would still recommend using a "real" web server. If you don't like the idea of needing to install something like Apache or Nginx, you can still go with a solution that is still as easy as "run a python script" by using some of the WSGI Standalone servers, which can run a server that is designed to be in production with something just as simple as running python run_app.py in the command line. You typically just need to create a 4-5 line python script to import and create the server object, point it to your Flask app, and run it.
gunicorn could be run with only the following on the command line, no extra script needed:
gunicorn myproject:app
...where "myproject" is the Python package that contains the app Flask object. Keep in mind that one of developers of gunicorn would probably recommend against this approach. See https://serverfault.com/questions/331256/why-do-i-need-nginx-and-something-like-gunicorn.
The OP has long-since moved on, but for those who encounter this question in the future I would just add that setting up an Apache server, even on a laptop, is free and pretty easy. It can be readily configured for as few or as many features as you want just by uncomment in or commenting out lines in the config file. There might be an even easier GUI method for doing that nowdays, but just editing the configs is simple.

Testing a Product that Includes Syncing and other Network Requests

I am nearing the release of an iOS app that syncs and otherwise interacts with a server. I am struggling with a testing procedure that can cover most/all possible situations. I don't have any experience with automated testing so I have been doing everything manually so far with the iPhone simulator and a physical device.
How would I start designing automated tests that can help me get better coverage of possible situations and also serve me well in the future as I make changes and add new features?
You probably need to be more specific in your question. ie. outline how you communicate with your server, what technology is being employed etc.
But as a general approach the first thing I would be doing is looking to find a way to get reproducable results from the server. For example if I send a message asking for a record with an id of 'x' then the server will alwasy return the same record with the same data. There are severa ways to do this, one would be to load a set of test data into your server. Another would be to create a local test server and talk to that instead. Another option is to avoid the server all together in your automaticed tests and mock out the communication classes in your app. It totally depends on what you are trying to test and how.
Once you have your back end dealt with you can then look into automating the tests. This very much depends on how you have dealt with the server. For example, if you are performing an integration style test where you actually talk to a server, then the test might take the form:
Reset or clear the server data.
Load it with predictable data.
Run the iOS app using some testing framework and verify any data sent from the server.
Access the server and verify any changes made there.

How To Deploy Web Application

We have an internal web system that handles the majority of our companies business. Hundreds of users use it throughout the day, it's very high priority and must always be running. We're looking at moving to ASP.NET MVC 2; at the moment we use web forms. The beauty of using web forms is we can instantaneously release a single web page as opposed to deploying the entire application.
I'm interested to know how others are deploying their applications whilst still making them accessible to the user. Using the deployment tool in Visual Studio would supposedly cause a halt. I'm looking for a method that's super quick.
If you had high priority bug fixes for example, would it be wise to perhaps mix web forms with MVC and instead replace the view with a code-behind web form until you make the next proper release which isn't a web form?
I've also seen other solutions on the same server of having the same web application run side-by-side and either change the root directory in IIS or change the web.config to point to a different folder, but the problem with this is that you have to do an entire build and deploy even if it were for a simple bug fix.
EDIT: To elaborate, how do you deploy the application without causing any disruption to users.
How is everyone else doing it?
I guess you can run the MVC application uncompiled also? and just replace .cs/views and such on the run.
A websetup uninstall/install is very quick, but it kills the application pool.. which might cause problem. Depending on how your site is built.
The smoothest way is to run it on two servers and store the sessions in sql server or shared state. Then you can just bring S1 down and patch it => bring s1 back up again and bring S2 down => patch S2 and then bring it up again. Al thought this might not work if you make any major changes to the session parts of the code.
Have multiple instances of your website running on multiple servers. The best way to do it is to have a production environment, a test environment, and a developement environment. You can create test cases and run the load every time you have a new build, if can get through all the tests, move the version into production ;).
You could have two physical servers each running IIS and hosting a copy of the site. OR you could run two copies of the site under different IIS endpoints on the SAME server.
Either way you cut it you are going to need at least two copies of the site in production.
I call this an A<->B switch method.
Firstly, have each production site on a different IP address. In your company's DNS, add an entry set to one of the IPs and give it a really short TTL. Then you can update site B and also pre-test/warm-up the site by hitting the IP address. When it's ready to go, get your DNS switched to the new site B. Once your TTL has expired you can take down site A and update it.
Using a shared session state will help to minimise the transition of users between sites.

Stress testing with simulated browser behaviour

I tried JMeter and it's great but fails in what I need.
Basically I'm testing an ASP script that returns frameset to the client. When frameset renders it calls a couple of other asp scripts which render in separate frames. When I test this with JMeter I only get results for the output of the main script that renders first. JMeter is not behaving as browser would and is not trying to render the html that it receives, and therefore not requesting separate asp scripts and doesn't render them.
The application I'm trying to test is "Aquaforest Tiff server". And I need to know how much time it needs to load tiffserver, along with tiff images from the storage under large number of concurrent connections. Is there a way to actually simulate browser behavior and to render the script that is returned as a response and measure response times all together from start to end???
PS. If I was not clear enough, please tell me... I'll try to elaborate more if you don't understand what I'm talking about here...
Try Selenium or Google WebDriver. You can write unit tests to remote control Firefox and IE. We're doing that for integration tests and it works fine. Occasionally, i pimp one of the integration tests to run multi-threaded in loops for benchmarking.
Visual Studio Test Edition should do the trick for you. A Visual Studio web test recording will record that the page requested the sub pages as dependant http requests.
However, you can still simulate the load correctly, you just have to instruct JMeter to do the http requests for the dependant requests. To record the complete array of http requests made, try using fiddler2 to record. Fiddler2 also works to record visual studio web tests.
I found the 'Retrieve All Embeded Resources from HTML Files' option under HTTP Request and it does download resources that are more deeply nested...
But I don't think this solves my problem, because I have some resources that are downloaded with use of javascript. And I don't see them downloaded in the Results Tree. Am I right?