Continuous Validation of Load Test Suites
Authors -
Mark, D. Syer;
Zhen, Ming Jiang;
Meiyappan, Nagappan;
Ahmed, E. Hassan;
Mohamed, Nasser and
Parminder, Flora
Venue -
Related Tags -
Abstract -
Ultra-Large-Scale (ULS) systems face continuously evolving
field workloads in terms of activated/disabled feature sets, varying usage patterns and changing deployment configurations.
These evolving workloads often have a large impact on
the performance of a ULS system. Hence, continuous load
testing is critical to ensuring the error-free operation of such
systems. A common challenge facing performance analysts
is to validate if a load test closely resembles the current field
workloads. Such validation may be performed by comparing
execution logs from the load test and the field. However, the size and unstructured nature of execution logs makes
such a comparison unfeasible without automated support.
In this paper, we propose an automated approach to validate
whether a load test resembles the field workload and, if not, determines how they differ by compare execution logs from
a load test and the field. Performance analysts can then update
their load test cases to eliminate such differences, hence
creating more realistic load test cases. We perform three
case studies on two large systems: one open-source system
and one enterprise system. Our approach identifies differences
between load tests and the field with a precision of 75 compared to only 16 for the state-of-the-practice.
Preprint -
PDF
BibTex -
@article{Syer2014_3,
author = {Mark, D. Syer and Zhen, Ming Jiang and Meiyappan, Nagappan and Ahmed, E. Hassan and Mohamed, Nasser and Parminder, Flora},
keyword = {ICPE,Performance, Log File Analysis,2014},
title = {Continuous Validation of Load Test Suites},
type = {conference}
}