Re: [TCLUG:14777] web stress test utilities

[Chris McKinley <lamfada@lugh.net>]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, Perry Hoekstra wrote:

> "Andrew S. Zbikowski" wrote:
> > 
> > Dunno, but you could probally set it up with perl and perls web
> > interfaces...
> > Don't ask me how...I don't know perl yet.
> 
> Many different ways to skin a cat.  I just built one that spawns ten
> clients, each one banging on the server 2,000 times. I wrote this was
> written in Java to test load-balancing across clustered servers.  Do you
> have the ability to spawn threads in Perl and Python?  I used to know
> Perl but not to that level.

There is not really a thread mechanism as such in perl, although the perl 
binary itself can be multithreaded.  To do something similar, you would 
have to use fork() to get the number of processes.  Perl does have a well
written set of libraries for handling all parts of the web experience, from
writing CGI scripts to LWP::UserAgent for writing web apps.  In this case, you 
would use LWP::UserAgent to get your page, then if you want to be really 
sophisticated, you can use HTML::Parser to get the URLs from the file, and 
then recursively use LWP::UserAgent to get the images, etc, follow links, or 
whatever.

-Chris