Load-Testing SOAP Servers

With Webserver Stress Tool you can perform load and stress tests for SOAP Servers/SOAP Services.  SOAP method calls are nothing else than HTTP requests that send an XML dataset using a POST request to a webserver and then receive the results as an XML string.

Even though Webserver Stress Tool is not specialized in reading and writing the XML data for these requests, you can still use it as a load generator for your SOAP services.

This sample shows how to use Webserver Stress Tool. to issue a SOAP request to Google’s Webservices API. Note: Of course you should refrain from load testing Google’s webservers!

The trickiest thing of course is to find out the three input parameters. You must get this information from the SOAP server’s documentation. For Google these are:

HTTP URL	http://api.google.com/search/beta2
SOAPACTION	"urn:GoogleSearchAction"

The XML-POSTDATA for the request should be stored into a file on your disk. To run a search request on Google the XML would be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" xmlns:tns="urn:GoogleSearch" xmlns:types="urn:GoogleSearch/encodedTypes" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

  <soap:Body soap:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">

    <tns:doGoogleSearch>

      <key xsi:type="xsd:string">*** PLACE YOUR GOOGLE API ACCESS KEY HERE ***</key>

      <q xsi:type="xsd:string">paessler</q>

      <start xsi:type="xsd:int">0</start>

      <maxResults xsi:type="xsd:int">10</maxResults>

      <filter xsi:type="xsd:boolean">false</filter>

      <restrict xsi:type="xsd:string" />

      <safeSearch xsi:type="xsd:boolean">false</safeSearch>

      <lr xsi:type="xsd:string" />

      <ie xsi:type="xsd:string" />

      <oe xsi:type="xsd:string" />

    </tns:doGoogleSearch>

  </soap:Body>

</soap:Envelope>

Having this information we can now set up the URL script for Webserver Stress Tool for our test. By setting a value for data.soapaction we instruct Webserver Stress Tool to actually send a SOAP request with content type “text/xml”:

Sub OnBeforeClick

 

 data.url="http://api.google.com/search/beta2"

 data.postdata=loadstringfromfile("c:yourpath\soaprequest.txt")

 data.soapaction="urn:GoogleSearchAction"

 

end Sub

 

Sub OnAfterClick

  data.log=""

end sub

 

Sub OnbeforeRequest

  data.log=""

end sub

 

Sub OnAfterRequest

  data.log=""

end sub

After running the test the results from Google can then be reviewed if you enable “Save HTML to files”

Etc.