SyLaGen – An Extendable Tool Environment for Generating Load

Abstract

Measuring run time behaviour of systems under load can cause the need for complex workload definitions, measurement strategies and integration of load generation techniques. In this contribution we present SyLaGen (“Synthetic Load Generator”), a load generation environment that focuses on extendability with respect to four different aspects: First, a system under test may offer different interfaces for handling external requests, thus a load generator must be able to handle different protocols randomly and in parallel. Second, load generation for a client-server system may require complex client behaviour that cannot be formulated in a simple descriptive way, but instead with non-trivial algorithms that have to be implemented programmatically. Third, more than simple atomic measurements may be required in complex environments, so that strategies applying sequences of measurements to a system should be configured. Finally, comprehensive requirements engineering may result in complex use cases that cannot be modelled as linear scripts.