hansel

Hansel is a pure ruby driver for httperf for automated load and performance testing. It will load a job queue file, in a yaml format, run httperf with each job

Installing Httperf and Hansel

Httperf

For Linux (Ubuntu):

apt-get update && apt-get -y install rubygems httperf ruby1.8-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev
gem install rubygems-update
export PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin
update_rubygems

On MacOS X using homebrew:

brew install httperf

finally:

gem install hansel

Optional – Installing Octave using macports (warning: long!)

sudo port install octave

Example usage

Create a job queue file in ~/.hansel/jobs.yml:

---
  - :server: www.example.com
    :uri: /
    :num_conns: 50
    :low_rate: 10
    :high_rate: 50
    :rate_step: 10

  - :server: www.apple.com
    :uri: /
    :num_conns: 50
    :low_rate: 10
    :high_rate: 50
    :rate_step: 10

and run Hansel

hansel --verbose --format=octave

By default, the output is written into the ~/hansel_output directory. When the octave format is specified, it uses the default template octave.m.erb in the project templates. Here is a sample output from the previous job:

rate              = [5, 10, 15, 20];
request_rate      = [5.1, 9.3, 12.9, 15.8];
connection_rate   = [5.1, 9.3, 12.9, 15.8];
reply_rate_avg    = [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0];
reply_rate_max    = [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0];
reply_time        = [88.4, 93.4, 89.2, 89.1];
reply_rate_stddev = [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0];
errors            = [0, 0, 0, 0];

plot(rate, request_rate, '-k*');
hold on;
plot(rate, connection_rate, '-kd');
hold on;
plot(rate, reply_rate_max, '-kp');
hold on;
plot(rate, reply_rate_max, '-k+');
hold on;
plot(rate, reply_rate_stddev, '-kh');
hold on;
plot(rate, reply_time, '-g*');
hold on;
plot(rate, errors, '-r*');

grid on;

axis([0 20 0 20]);
title('Hansel report for www.example.com:80/ (10 connections per run)')
xlabel('Demanded Request Rate');
legend('Request Rate', 'Connection Rate', 'Avg. reply rate', 'Max. reply rate', 'Reply rate StdDev', 'Reply time', 'Errors');
print('/Users/paulm/hansel_output/hansel-10.m.png', '-dpng')

Run octave on it will produce graph as a png file.

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

References

“HTTP Perforance Testing with httperf”:agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/04/http-performance-testing-with-httperf.html “Perforance vs Load Testing”:agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/04/more-on-performance-vs-load-testing.html