IDEALX's TSUNAMI project (IDX-TSUNAMI)

The purpose of IDX-Tsunami is to simulate users in order to test the scalability and performances of IP based client/server applications. Currently, only the Jabber protocol has been implemented and tested, but it can be easily extended . IDX-Tsunami use the Erlang language.

This tool can simulate thousands of users concurrently, and can be distributed on several client machines. Up to 10000 users can be simulated on a single machine (the limit depends on the hardware and also on the activity of the simulated clients).

The idea is to simulate the behavior of a real world client using a stochastic model, in order to achieve a more realistic traffic than other simple models (deterministics).

A client's session is characterize by:

• the number of requests during a session
• the mean time elapsed between each request ("think time")
• the type and parameters of requests (including, for example, 'chat' message size for Jabber)

The arrival process of users into the server is also characterize by a random distribution (exponential by default).