Asynchronous request support

Frederic

We use the evaluation version of Ants to test our web-service.
Simple test works ok.
However, to mimic more closely how the (C++) client uses the web-service, we would like to send multiple request asynchronously from the >same< client.
Using Ants VB.Net script, the standard BeginXXX/EndXXX seems to not be implemented.
Is it a limitation of the version we have or a design choice of Ants ?

Regards

Brian Donahue

Hello Frederic,

Thanks for your interest in ANTS Load. The design of the WebClient is synchronous, in other words it sends the complete request before collecting the response from the server and sending the next request.

ANTS Load is designed to simulate many web clients accessing the server, so this makes sense as a design. If you opened more than one browser on a computer and made requests to a web server, you would still have essentially two web clients, only acting from the same machine.

Frederic

That's true for a web-server, but does not apply to a web-service.

The whole purpose of web-service is to be called from code (be it C++ or .Net, etc), not from a browser.
Therefore, for the sake of performance, the proxy classes are often (always ?) used through their asynchronous interfaces.

What you are saying is we can't simulate advanced web-service usage from AntsLoad .Net scripts, that's too bad

Btw, how do you simulate (e.g test) the download of several items on a standard web-page if you don't support multiple requests ??

Best regards

Brian Donahue

Hi Frederick,

That's a good point. ANTS Load doesn't support several asynchronous transfers: it does everything sequentially.

I don't think that the effect of this would be too noticable when running tests with many virtual clients, though.