Test component assignment and scheduling in a load testing environment

Abstract

In this paper we introduce two major problems from the field of load (or performance) testing and our solutions for them. When testing the performance of a device (System Under Test - SUT), the test environment executes many software entities (the so-called test components) on the hosts of the test environment (testing hosts). Our goal is to maximize the load on the testing hosts by assigning the test components to them closely to optimal. The first problem to be solved is, thus, a special case of the task assignment problem for which many algorithms have been developed. Our solutions presented in this paper are, however, optimized for distributing load testing traffic in the case of which the possibilities and restrictions to be taken into account are very different from those of the classical task assignment case. The other problem we deal with is how to schedule test components running on the same testing host. Most of the papers written on scheduling focus on the characteristics of the generated load, bu t not on the way of generating it. These papers usually assume that the load can be generated by improving hardware resources. In this paper, however, we introduce a model and an algorithm which improves the efficiency of scheduling in a load testing environment with way less hardware resources. The algorithm is based on our novel concept of virtual threads. Our simulations have shown that by applying our solutions, the efficiency of load testing can be significantly increased.