Continuous validation of load test suites

Authors: Mark D. Syer Zhen Ming Jiang Meiyappan Nagappan Ahmed E. Hassan Mohamed Nasser Parminder Flora

Venue: 5th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), pp. 259--270, 2014

Year: 2014

Abstract: Ultra-Large-Scale (ULS) systems face continuously evolving field workloads in terms of activated/disabled feature sets, varying usage patterns and changing deployment configurations. These evolving workloads often have a large impact, on the performance of a ULS system. Hence, continuous load testing is critical to ensuring the error-free operation of such systems. A common challenge facing performance analysts is to validate if a load test closely resembles the current field workloads. Such validation may be performed by comparing execution logs from the load test and the field. However, the size and unstructured nature of execution logs makes such a comparison unfeasible without automated support. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to validate whether a load test resembles the field workload and, if not, determines how they differ by compare execution logs from a load test and the field. Performance analysts can then update their load test cases to eliminate such differences, hence creating more realistic load test cases. We perform three case studies on two large systems: one open-source system and one enterprise system. Our approach identifies differences between load tests and the field with a precision of >75% compared to only >16% for the state-of-the-practice.

Preprint: PDF

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{markd.syer2014cvolts,
    author = "Mark D. Syer and Zhen Ming Jiang and Meiyappan Nagappan and Ahmed E. Hassan and Mohamed Nasser and Parminder Flora",
    title = "Continuous validation of load test suites",
    year = "2014",
    pages = "259--270",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 5th ACM/SPEC international conference on Performance engineering"
}

Plain Text:

Mark D. Syer, Zhen Ming Jiang, Meiyappan Nagappan, Ahmed E. Hassan, Mohamed Nasser, and Parminder Flora, "Continuous validation of load test suites," 5th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), pp. 259--270