stress testing

[Roger Dingledine]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 03:59:48AM -0400, Matej Pfajfar wrote:
> I am going to start writing a "network simulation", i.e. something that 
> will make many connections through the or net and verify that the transfer 
> was OK. Whatever bugs there might still be in there, I reckon they'll show 
> up if we use something like that ...

When I was trying to hammer the onion router network yesterday to find
where the bugs were, I asked around and people pointed me to httperf
(http://freshmeat.net/projects/httperf/?topic_id=90). It's written by
some people at HP to do stress testing for web servers. You can set it to
do a certain number of hits a second, keep stats of how long they take,
what percentage succeed, etc.

It's a nice program. So it will definitely do basic stress testing for
us. I haven't looked in detail at what Bruce has been looking at, but
I'm assuming it tries to simulate plausible user patterns. So that will
be useful too.

Other helpful tools include using valgrind and electric fence to detect
memory problems (I used ef to find the recent bug in create_onion).

--Roger