Pylot – Web Performance Tool Tutorial Part 1

It is very important to know about more than one performance testing tool. I always say in a training sessions, all performance test engineers should know at least one open source tool and one commercial tool. HP LoadRunner & JMeter, IBM Rational Performance Tester & LoadUI etc.

In this blog post series, we will see about free open source web performance tool called Pylot.

What is Pylot?

Pylot is a free open source tool for testing performance and scalability of web services. It runs HTTP load tests, which helps for capacity planning, benchmarking, analysis, and system tuning.

How it works?

Test case designs can be done using XML files. In the XML file, you can define the URL, method, body etc and the server responses can be verified using regular expressions and using HTTP codes.

Workload model can be specified in the GUI of Pylot or in the command line like number of agents, ramp-up, steady state, ramp-down, duration, interval etc.

This tool helps developers, test engineers, and performance engineers to validate, tune and plan the performance and web services scalability.

Features of Pylot

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

How to install Pylot?

There will be five installation which should be installed sequentially.

Installation 1

Download and install latest release of Pylot

Installation 2

Download and install Python 2.5+

Installation 3

Download and install wxPython for GUI mode which is optional, but most of us prefers to work on GUI. Hence I prefer it as mandatory installation.

Installation 4

Download and install NumPy for report graphs

Installation 5

Download and install Matplotlib for report graphs

How to run Pylot in GUI mode

Go to Start > Run, type cmd. In command prompt, go to the path where you unzipped Pylot installation folder and type run.py -g command  as shown below.

This will launch Pylot in GUI mode as shown below.

In next post, we will see how to design test cases in Pylot.

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