How can one simulate a web browser, or just the Flash plugin, to load-test a Flash-based web-application?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1015736
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06-07-2019 - |
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I guess I don't need the web browser, since network capabilities are built into the stand-alone player. I just need some kind of .NET component which will allow me to programatically start hundreds of flash players (with no UI) playing a specific SWF file for load testing purposes. The SWF file accesses a network service and downloads other SWF files, but basically runs on its own to completion once loaded into the player.
It would be nice if such a component would also allow me to detect when it is no longer accessing the network for a period of time or receive a message indicating that the SWF has finished its work, at which point I would terminate that instance of the flash player and start up a new one.
Perhaps I could use the existing flash player, but I don't want to actually start a player with a UI, I basically need to program a player with no UI, because if I'm going to be running hundreds of them on one machine, I don't need the overhead of actually rendering all the graphics. I will probably have this running on multiple machines as a distributed application.
Any thoughts?
Solution
If you need real browsers (which all have Flash 10 installed), check out my company, BrowserMob. It effectively does "Selenium load testing". A lot of our customers do Flash automation using our service and it is a LOT easier than traditional protocol-level load testing.
OTHER TIPS
All the server cares about is the sequence of requests, that's what you want to simulate.
If the SWF uses HTTP for its content requests, JMeter or siege would be some free tools that help with that. Otherwise there are many commercial load testing tools. I can tell you the one that my company uses costs "lots", but I tend to use JMeter or siege when I do my testing before handing off to QA.
If you are testing streaming media, that becomes a bit more complex and you will probably have to validate your system as individual components.
I suggest the Allspaw book to anyone trying to do load testing.
If you're convinced that nothing will work except running the flash movie, grab one of the scripts for generating browser-based screenshots like Thummer. These will load the page you give it in either Firefox or Safari, and you can tweak them to loop like crazy and allow the flash movie to run.
A UI testing tool like selenium for firefox may also work to let you script what you want to do and fire off an automated sequence.
I also agree with Ditto -- JMeter will not only simulate the requests, but give you some usable metrics when you're done. If you do it yourself with a bunch of browsers, how will you know where the bottlenecks are?
