We are using the Paessler web server stress tool to test our asp.net web application. Our web app keeps an audit log of user actions, however, in order to improve performance, the audit logging is handled asynchronously by the web app. The result of this is that when running Paessler web server stress tool against our application we do no see any of the audit log entries written to the database.

Is there anything that can be done about this from the web server stress tool configuration side? I don't know if the problem is that we are stressing the server so much it just never gets to process the background threads, or if the tool is killing the worker processes before they get a chance to process the audit logging. Anyways, if anyone has any ideas I would greatly appreciate any help on this.

Article Comments

By design webstress does not parse the HTML it receives (and it does not process any Javascript in the pages either). Webstress is a HTTP request generator, not a browser simulator. So it is normal for your test not receive any audit logs.

You could create a "URL Script" inside Webstress where the first URL of the test is the original page and all other URLs of the script are the audit log URLs which are usually created by AJAX. See the URL Script section of the manual.


Sep, 2012 - Permalink

Thanks very much for the reply. This is helpful. I am interested in creating a 'URL Script' which more accurately tests our application. However I am unsure of how to go about doing this.

One thought I had would be to run through the normal test click sequence against the app, and then examine the IIS logs, and then use that information to generate the URL Scripts. Does this sound like something close to what I want to do?


Sep, 2012 - Permalink

Yes, that's the correct approach. Either use the logs of IIS or use a HTTP tracer tool like Fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/) to find the URLs and then write a script based on these URLs.


Sep, 2012 - Permalink