stress testing edubuntu

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Fri, 17 Aug 2007, Jim Kronebusch wrote:

> I talked to Robert Arkeletian the other day (the guy who writes
> fl_teachertool) and he said he had some scripts that can shutdown a
> client and boot them via wake on lan.  I told him if he had a chance he
> should get those scripts to you so that you may try and incorporate them
> into the stress test system.  

That'd be interesting alright.

> If you don't hear from him you might want to contact him personally.  I
> know last time we talked you were still looking for a way to do this.

There's no great rush.  Right now, when I get time, I mostly want to get
the user simulator correct.  For now, it'll be just a couple of rudimentary
tasks that can be done from the command line but I've played about a bit
with dogtail and ldtp to do more complex things.

To make things more realistic I need to figure out some idea of what
consitutes "normal use".  If someone's browsing the web, do they tend to
take a new url on average every 30 seconds or more often (more
cpu/bandwidth)?  Do ordinary users tend to keep lots of tabs open (more
memory usage) or stick to one or two?  I guess the answer is probably that
if you have 40 users you'll get a distribution of all of these.

As you suggested it's possible that a big bunch of volunteers recording
their actions into "recipes" might be the best way to get a feeling of real
usage.  Both ldtp and dogtail can record and replay users' actions like
this.  Sadly, the most important application, firefox, is a little behind
in its AT-SPI support just now so until Firefox v3 we might need to use
epiphany.

Gavin