Load testing with FitNesse

Question

I am looking for ways to perform load testing with FitNesse. My colleagues use a low-code platform and a common complaint is that their applications work fine until the load gets high. I have recently started using FitNesse (+ HSAC fixtures) for functional UI testing and was wondering if it is possible to run some of those tests multiple times simuntaneously. I have done some Google searches and asked ChatGPT, but it has been difficult to find information on this topic. Can someone please point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

I don't think it's possible, check out specialized performance testing tools, if you prefer Java/JVM-based options they're:

• Apache JMeter
• Gatling
• The Grinder

More information including comparison of main features: Open Source Load Testing Tools: Which One Should You Use?

Answer 2

The tools recommended by Dimitri are indeed designed to load test sites. They will much more suited to stress the system than the HSAC fixtures, which are targeted at functional testing.

Having said that you can:

• run a couple of tests parallel: just open multiple tabs and press 'Test' in each (or start multiple CI jobs, jUnit runs, docker containers in parallel). This will put much more load on the test runner making it much harder to generate any real load on the system being tested.

• some of the load testing tools offer a 'proxy' that can record requests sent from a browser instead of having to create the script by hand (although I expect the captured interactions will need manual modification to ensure multiple logins/sessions are created correctly). You can maybe connect such a proxy to a test run performed by the HSAC fixtures. So the actual functional test script is used as a driver to generate the 'boilerplate' load testing script that you then modify/fix by hand. This might be an easier way to maintain the load test definition (if the manual modification of the generated/captured interaction is not too much effort). This requires you to configure the browser launched by the HSAC fixtures to connect via the proxy provided by the load testing tool. Maybe you can set that up by configuring the proxy for your local machine and just run the tests there, but maybe you need to configure additional settings in the 'selenium driver setup' table in your SuiteSetUp.