Tsung: A open-source, multi-protocol, distributed load testing tool

As we said earlier, we will be concentrating on load testers, stress testers, etc. continuing with the same trend. Tsung is an open-source multi-protocol distributed load testing tool which has been programmed in Erlang. Erlang is an open-source language made by Ericsson for building robust fault-tolerant distributed applications.

HTTP

<a href="http://pentestit.com/tag/webdav/">WebDAV</a>

SOAP

PostgreSQL

MySQL

LDAP

Jabber/XMPP

Main features of Tsung:

High Performance: Tsung can simulate a huge number of simultaneous users per physical computer. It can simulates thousands of users on a single CPU!

Distributed: The load can be distributed on a cluster of client machines! Truly a first when it comes to stress testing!

Multi-Protocols using a plug-in system: HTTP (both standard web traffic and SOAP), WebDAV, Jabber/XMPP and PostgreSQL are currently supported. Experimental LDAP and MySQL plugins are included in the 1.3.0 release.

SSL support

Several IP addresses can be used on a single machine using the underlying OS IP Aliasing

XML configuration system: complex user’s scenarios are written in XML. Scenarios can be written with a simple browser using the Tsung recorder (HTTP and PostgreSQL only).

Dynamic scenarios: You can get dynamic data from the server under load (without writing any code) and re-inject it in subsequent requests. You can also loop, restart or stop a session when a string (or regexp) matches the server response.

Mixed behaviours: several sessions can be used to simulate different type of users during the same benchmark. You can define the proportion of the various behaviours in the benchmark scenario.

Stochastic processes: in order to generate a realistic traffic, user thinktimes and the arrival rate can be randomize using a probability distribution (currently exponential)

It does have some pro-requisites though which are not found on normal servers. But well, with an application like this, we are no doubt you will get the necessary softwares installed!