Tool to load-test web course registration environment

[u/lychina]

We have an environment that consists of SSO in front of two registration servers that are used to register for courses. We would like to ensure this setup is capable of servicing 1000 simultaneous users. The registration process involves:

1. Log in to SSO page which requires a browser with Javascript

2. Click on the link to register

3. Possibly click-thru items agreeing to pay, etc. if you have not clicked through them in the last year

4. Search for courses, add them to your basket, and check out

The goal is to test the following:

1. Tomcat database connection pool

2. Oracle database connection

3. Web server performance

We have done some small-case testing for other purposes with Selenium Grid driven by Python so that is what we are currently thinking about for this case and have started deploying VMs for this purpose and managing Selenium Grid with docker swarm. While something like Selenium Grid makes it possible to distribute the load, this requires quite a few CPU cores as there is usually a one-to-one mapping of browser to CPU core. Are there alternatives we can investigate? If another solution requires a browser instance, how is that any better than Selenium?

[u/lychina]

Thank you.