Open source testing app for Flex app using AMF and BlazeDS

Question

I am looking for an open source tool that measures response time as well as provide result status of a Flex application using AMF and BlazeDS. I am not very familiar with Flex technologies, but would like to capture this information from a calling Java method, if possible, for monitoring purposes.

Answer 1

You can probably do this with NeoLoad. I created a video a while back that goes through the tool.

Answer 2

Getting performance information out of Flex/BlazeDS can be a bit of a challenge. Here are a few tools I've used:

Debug-level Logging

By default, BlazeDS doesn't really tell you much about what it's doing. You can change this by setting the logging level to Debug or All and get some basic information about how messages are being delivered:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/blazeds/1/blazeds_devguide/help.html?content=services_logging_3.html

DS-Console

This is a sample application (.war) that comes with the Flex SDK that you can deploy on your application server (Tomcat, JBoss, etc) to get some basic information about connections going in and out of your Flex/BlazeDS application. It's good if you want a high-level view of what is going on, or if you find yourself running out of session resources and want to figure out why. Here's a blog post that mentions how to set it up — it's pretty straightforward:

http://www.brightworks.com/flex_ability/?p=73

MPI Information

There are some message performance information headers you can enable in BlazeDS that will give you more detailed information at the messaging level (timestamps, message sizes, etc). This can be a bit more challenging to set up depending on how complicated your channel configuration is, but here's a post that outlines it pretty well (it was written for LCDS, but it also applies to BlazeDS):

http://sujitreddyg.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/measuring-message-processing-performance/

Finally, I wrote a blog post about improving BlazeDS performance for streaming connections a few months ago after giving a talk on that very subject, which may also be useful to you:

http://www.dan-menard.com/2010/03/29/improving-performance-in-flex-and-scaling-blazeds/