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cnd's avatar
cnd
Occasional Contributor
16 years ago

How does the Load Test Limit setting really work?

I've been getting some strange results from my load tests using Thread strategy (other strategies also suffer from the same issue). It seems that if I set the Limit parameter (seconds) to a value that is not long enough, SoapUI will race through the number of threads, and ending up not doing much as shown in the exported statistic history. It seems as if SoapUI doesn't wait for threads to finish before terminating them and launching new threads to fit everything into the allotted time.

The end result is when you export the statistic history, there are only a few rows of stats collected, with many expected rows missing. Specifically, I would expect a number of records for each number of threads ranging from the lower thread limit to upper. However, in my tests, I see only a few rows.

Below's an example stats history export for a test that has Start Threads = 1; End Threads = 60; Limit: 15 seconds (I set this artificially low to make the point):

ThreadCount,min,max,avg,last,cnt,tps,bytes,bps,err
60,15386,15386,15386,15386,1,0,3991,259,0
60,11667,21683,16675,17964,2,0,7982,444,0

As you can see... there are only two records for threads 60. Where are threads 1 to 59? If SoapUI had problems measuring threads 1 to 59, I would expect to see some sort of warning or error messages?

Anyone can shed some light into this? If the Limit needs to be set higher... what is the formula for setting it so that the test works as expected? Obviously, I want to set the Limit to the minimum amount so that the test runs as quickly as possible.

2 Replies

  • Jan_Stepan's avatar
    Jan_Stepan
    Occasional Contributor
    I'm also wondering how the history collection works. I run a burst test for 300 seconds and set the interval to 250ms. I'd expect to get 1200 samples, but soapUI appears to collect around half of that and the number of samples seems to vary with the number of threads.


    • 100 threads gives 658 samples

    • 200 threads gives 684 samples

    • 300 threads gives 717 samples

    • 400 threads gives 741 samples

    • 500 threads gives 724 samples


    I too would appreciate a little help so I can make sense of the results.

    Thanks in advance for your help.
  • SmartBear_Suppo's avatar
    SmartBear_Suppo
    SmartBear Alumni (Retired)
    Hi!

    sorry for the delayed response.. there are two questions here:

    MethodCoder: The statistics only show the value for the "current" thread-count, ie values for previous thread-counts are not shown.. use the Statistics Log (in the LoadTest Options) to continuously export them for analysis in some external tool (for now at least..)

    Jan Stepan: Can you give more details on your setup, maybe attach a screeshot of the LoadTest window so I can see config and results?

    cheers!

    /Ole
    eviware.com