How to benchmark APE (or other Comet server)?

Question

I'm evaluating several Comet servers because I need HTTP Push in a new project of mine. I'm currently testing with snode.js/socket.io, APE (Ajax Push Engine) and Mongrel2. I'd like to run some rudimentary benchmarks, but how?

I have put the Comet servers on a separate VM. I have been able to simulate many concurrent users for Node.js by using another Node.js instance using the socket.io-client module. But APE (and some other Comet servers) seem to require a complete browser. At least something that understands basic HTML (like IFrames) and can execute JavaScript.

Is there any way I can simulate, say, 50 concurrent users from my desktop machine?

Answer 1

I ended up using phantom.js and casper.js. They emulate browsers with full AJAX support, but are much lighter than complete browser virtualisation like Selenium. This enable me to run approximately 50 virtual browsers on a normal desktop desktop machine, so I can quite easily scale the load on my test server with just a few desktops.