Load testing a Facebook canvas app

1
votes

We created a facebook canvas application that is now ready for load testing. But we are uncertain how to achieve this. I read some posts here on stackoverflow (like http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions/10364579/limit-of-500-test-users-per-facebook-app-should-i-stub-the-facebook-api-for-au, http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions/3660409/facebook-application-load-testing) but could not get a full picture, therefore I post again. Currently I see 3 ways, doing research:

  • disable all Facebook API calls of our application and trigger the server directly
  • work together with a company like friendrunner or
  • use the test user api from facebook (up to 2000 testusers can be created http://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/)

Can anyone share some experiences with load testing of a Facebook Canvas App? Particularily I am interested in the 3rd point:

  • How did you generate the users, what values are necessary, how did you create the connections between friends
  • Which tool did you use to automate the test with the created test users? Currently I am looking into Jmeter, but read as well about Apache Bench and Seige. Is there a tool that is suited most?
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facebooktestingintegration-testingload-testing

1 Answers

1
votes

Besides the low limit, the test users in FB don't persist for long...so you have to re-create them every day. FriendRunner is dead, last time I checked.

We tested a FB canvas app by mocking all the FB systems and overriding the hostname resolution on the target servers to talk to our system instead of FB. This gave us complete control over the FB user population as well as the ability to control the response times from FB APIs - so we could see how changes in FB performance would affect the target application.

For generating virtual users, we used Load Tester (it is our product, so I'm biased).