Finally did the version 1.0 release! visit www.pylot.org to download.

Pylot is still lacking some features I want to add for it to become a serious performance/load testing tool, but the current release delivers very usable functionality.

Current Features:

• multi-threaded load generator
• HTTP and HTTPS (SSL) support
• response verification with regular expressions
• execution/monitoring console
• real-time stats
• results reports with graphs
• GUI mode
• shell/console mode
• cross-platform

Aside from the GUI, there is also a new shell/console interface mode with real-time output for quickly profiling performance your application/service under test from the command line. In this mode, Pylot can run cross-platform. (tested on Windows XP, Vista, Cygwin, Ubuntu, MacOS)

Note: Extra special thanks to Vasil Vangelovski for implementing the original console output and C++ extension

Screenshots of the GUI and new shell/console UI output:

(Pylot is the open source web performance/load test tool that I am developing)

When a test run is finished, a report is automatically generated to summarize the test results. It includes various statistics and graphs on response times and throughput from the run. A sample of the results report can be seen here:

http://www.pylot.org/samples/results/results.html

Pylot also writes results to CSV files so you can import them into your favorite spreadsheet to crunch numbers, generate statistics, and create graphs. I have been working

I have also been working on the GUI. Here is the latest:

http://www.pylot.org/samples/ui/pylot_ui_screenshot_2007_08_20.png

Related:

• PyLT - Scratching My Itch - New Web Performance/Load Test Tool (Open Source)
• PyLT - Dev Update #1 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
• PyLT - Dev Update #2 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
• PyLT - Dev Update #3 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
• Pylot - Dev Update #4 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool (New Name and Defining Test Cases)
• Pylot - Dev Update #5 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool (Graphs With MatPlotlib)

We performance practioners love our graphs!  Visualizing data is helpful in analyzing performance results.  Sometimes a quick glance at a graph provides better understanding than a mound of raw or summarized data.  Pylot's Results Reporting feature creates graphs of response times (latency) and Throughput.

For the graphing toolkit, Pylot uses Matplotlib to produce fancy graphs like these:

Matplotlib allows you to graph data from Python. Here is a simple script that gives a glimpse of how a line/marker graph is created as a png image:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from pylab import *  # Matplotlib

def main():
    # sequence of data points to graph (x, y coordinates)
    points = [(1, 3), (2, 6), (3, 2), (4, 5)]
    graph(points)
   
   
def graph(points):
    fig = figure(figsize=(6, 2))  # image dimensions  
    ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
    ax.grid(True, color='#666666')
    xticks(size='x-small')
    yticks(size='x-small')
    x_seq = [item[0] for item in points] 
    y_seq = [item[1] for item in points] 
    ax.plot(x_seq, y_seq, 
        color='blue', linestyle='-', linewidth=1.0, marker='o', 
        markeredgecolor='blue', markerfacecolor='yellow', markersize=2.0)
    savefig('graph.png') 
    
    
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

The output looks like this:

Related:

• PyLT - Scratching My Itch - New Web Performance/Load Test Tool (Open Source)
• PyLT - Dev Update #1 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
• PyLT - Dev Update #2 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
• PyLT - Dev Update #3 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
• Pylot - Dev Update #4 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool (New Name and Defining Test Cases)

(Update: PyLT has been renamed to Pylot)

(PyLT is the open source web performance/load test tool that I am developing)

A quick update on PyLT development...

The load generating engine is looking pretty solid and seems to work really well so far. It uses threading for concurrency and seems to scale well (though I haven't put it through its paces enough yet).

The GUI is evolving more and starting to look like a real performance/load testing tool:

This is my first project using wxWidgets and wxPython.  I am finding it to be very powerful and relatively straight forward to design nice user interfaces.  However, this is a big jump for me.  The past few years I have mostly done web programming and work with distributed systems.  It took a bit to get my head back into traditional GUI application development and event-driven programming

More to come...

Related:

• PyLT - Scratching My Itch - New Web Performance/Load Test Tool (Open Source)
• PyLT - Dev Update #1 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool
• PyLT - Dev Update #2 - Web Performance/Load Test Tool

(Update: PyLT has been renamed to Pylot)

A quick update on PyLT development...

I have a working version of the guts of my tool (the multi-threaded load generator).  I have now started working on the user interface.  My initial idea was to use Tk for the GUI Toolkit.  I started developing a minimal GUI and quickly realized I need a Toolkit more powerful than Tk.

My original justification for using Tkinter (from blog comments):

"I will probably eventually move to a richer toolkit (like wxPython) if I take this thing far. For right now, Tk works. It comes distributed with core python, it's super fast and light, it's easy to use, and I know it pretty well. Though it looks like crap and is limited in many ways."

As of today I am rewriting the GUI with wxPython, which uses the wxWidgets Toolkit.  This should give me the ability to create a rich cross-platform UI for my tool.

[For posterity] Here is what the original prototype of the Tk UI looked like:

R.I.P. Tk... Hello wxWidgets

Related:
PyLT - Scratching My Itch - New Web Performance/Load Test Tool (Open Source) 

(Update: PyLT has been renamed to Pylot)

I have started development on a new web performance/load testing tool.  It is targeted at testing Web Services.

Here is some Q&A with myself:

You know you are reinventing the wheel, right?

Yes, I know.  There are already open source web load testing tools available (OpenSTA, JMeter, Grinder, WebLOAD, etc).  I have used all of these as well as proprietary tools for years.  I am a performance engineer and I feel like I need a tool set that I am intimately familiar with.  I need the ability to easily alter and tweak the tool at will.  I don't have the time, budget, or patience enough to wait on vendors when I need something.  I also want a tool that is fun to hack and adapt.  For this, I need to understand the code base deeply.

What language are you using?

Python.  The initial GUI uses Tk, but this may be changed down the road. I use Python's threading module for concurrency. If this doesn't scale well enough, I will be exploring other models of concurrency (perhaps generator based coroutines).

Why do you think you can write a tool like this?

I have worked in performance testing for nearly 10 years.  I have written many tools that work with various protocols to do distributed load generation and testing.  Creating a simple HTTP load generator is sort of my Hello World 2.0 for each language I try (I have written these from scratch in Python, Perl, Java, and C#).  This tool takes that basic concept and organizes it into a robust application.

Will it be Free and Open Source?

Of course!  Licensed under GNU GPL.

For an early look, check out the source repository at:  http://pylt.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

More details to come.

-Corey

Note to self...
use this:

Roll your own server in 50 lines of Python code (by Muharem Hrnjadovic):

"Just in case you wondered why there are so many frameworks in Python land, here’s a basic server (including a request dispatch mechanism) in only 50 lines of code."

Why *not* add a server interface to every tool I write?  :)