Does PolyGraph support load test real server?

[Alex Rousskov]

On Thu, 2007-10-04 at 19:01 +0000, Congyong Su wrote:

> Does the PolyGraph support load test real server, besides real proxy?

Polygraph was designed to test HTTP intermediaries and not origin
servers. However, HTTP intermediaries include reverse proxies, which are
similar to origin servers in terms of the HTTP interface.

You can use Polygraph to test an origin server by not starting any
polysrv processes. You will need to specify a "fake" Polygraph server in
your PGL workload. Use the address of the origin server as the fake
server address. You will need to collect origin server URLs and use a
trace replay feature to force Polygraph robots to use those real URLs.
If you use multiple polyclts, you will need to turn phase
synchronization off as it is done via Polygraph servers which you do not
have. You will need to tell polyclt to accept foreign messages because
true origin server responses will lack Polygraph-specific headers.

I may be missing a step or two here, but it should work in principle as
long as you are not bothered by a different tool focus and lack of
origin server-specific workloads or tutorials.

You should be able to find how to do the above by searching Web
Polygraph site. If you cannot figure something out, please ask.

Good luck,

Alex.
P.S. If you use more than one polyclt process and want to preserve phase
synchronization, you can start one Polygraph server and have a dedicated
robot on each polyclt host send requests to that single Polygraph server
at a low rate. This will allow polyclt processes to communicate with
each other and synchronize the phases.