

Why Load Testing Ajax is Hard - rickharrison
http://ajaxian.com/archives/why-load-testing-ajax-is-hard

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ars
I don't see how you can scale the solution. To actually load test you'd need
thousands of browser instances, which is not practical.

For example auto-complete has a built in delay of about half a second for each
keystroke. So how do you load test that? The fastest you can go is two
requests per second if you use a real browser.

~~~
modoc
Or hundreds of thousands of browser instances. The whole point of most load
test tools is they can generate far more load per hardware unit (CPU, RAM,
etc...) than browsers could due to being lighter-weight specialized programs.

I'm not sure why this is such an issue. Most commercial testing tools use
proxy recorders which will happily record all the AJAX requests along with the
normal requests, and will spit out test scripts that include the AJAX calls.
If you don't want them all using "banana" then just record 10 different
scripts (which you should be doing anyhow to cover the most common usage
models/flows for your site).

