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Reply-To: test-dev@httpd.apache.org
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 11:30:38 +0200
From: Jacek Prucia <jacek.prucia@7bulls.com>
To: test-dev@httpd.apache.org
Subject: Re: flood errors with login ASP script
Message-Id: <20020924113038.09f69f30.jacek.prucia@7bulls.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.33.0209231138550.13865-100000@maria.gaffle.com>
References: <Pine.BSO.4.33.0209231138550.13865-100000@maria.gaffle.com>
Organization: 7bulls.com S.A.
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On Mon, 23 Sep 2002 11:52:58 -0700 (PDT)
Erik Curiel <erik@gaffle.com> wrote:

Important thing first:

> We're running the latest non-CVS version of flood, compiled with SSL
> support, on Solaris 8, SPARC Ultra5.

I assume, you're using flood-0.4 tarball from ASF distribution site. We
have checked in a lot of bugfixes/features since that release. You
schould checkout current CVS version as described on flood site,
http://httpd.apache.org/test/flood, section CVS access.

> Hi!  I'm a flood newbie, trying to use flood for some very basic
> load-testing on a new commercial site we're building. We want to use
> the url-list feature to mimic actual click-through paths that we think
> clients will use on the site.  Clients must log in to use the site,
> however.  We can hit the first page, the login form, with flood with
> no problem.  When a client enters his or her login info
> (username/password), the form posts to an ASP script that verifies the
> info, sets a cookie with the session ID and then redirects (via the
> ASP Session.Redirect function, i.e. a Refresh HTTP header is
> generated) to the site's home page.  When we try to post directly to
> this ASP script with login info, flood reports a failure, but gives no
> info on what exactly failed.

You schould manually check headers returned by server
(curl/netcat/telnet). Flood's verify_200 function (which you are using)
expects HTTP/1.1 response. If (for some reason) your server returns
HTTP/1.0, you can use other verify function -- verify_status_code --
like this:

     <!-- Verification Events -->
     <verify_resp>verify_status_code</verify_resp>

Again -- you'll have this functionality only if you check out latest
flood source code.

> I try to write output to a
> log-file, by specifying a logfile element in the XML config file, but
> no log file appears to be created (at least, I can't find it).

Yup. I think that logfile element was a part of design, but never really
got implemented. However I was thinking about such functionality myself.
I'll put it on my flood TODO list.

> When we look
> at the log file on the server we're trying to hit, it shows that flood
> did indeed post to it, and the server sent back a 302 ("Object Moved)
> message, with the location of the page that the client is being
> redirected to. When I use the connection "keep-alive" directive in the
> header, by declaring the appropriate XML tag in the config file, then
> flood hits the login form no problem, but then hangs when it tries to
> hit the login script.  The server log still shows, however, that flood
> did succeed in posting to the script and the server responded with the
> same 302.

A small note here: after reading your XML file i see, that login POST is
the last url in your urllist. Using hints above you can get flood to
report 'OK', but it will *not* go further. I mean: it will not hit the
url received with 302 response. You have to add that url to your XML
file by hand. In near future, flood will have a 'mimic_browser' switch,
which when turned on (among other things) will cause flood to respond to
3xx type responses. However right now, you'll have to do this by
yourself.

> I insert the XML file we're using at the end of this email.  (We're
> not really trying to hit test.com, of course, but we're building this
> site for a big bank so we can't give out the real URL.)

Umm... There's another new feature in flood, that you might find
usefull. You can have following config:

<urllist>
   <baseurl>http://www.your_bank.com</baseurl>
   <url>/foo.asp</url>
   <url>/bar.asp</url>
</urllist>

With a little change in baseurl tag you can test different instances of
your site (like: test.your_bank.com, debug.your_bank.com and so on) with
the same url list.

As you can see -- flood has a lot of nice features, but we need a real
user documentation. This is exactly what I'm working on right now, so
stay tuned.

regards,
-- 
Jacek Prucia
7bulls.com S.A.
http://www.7bulls.com/