Stress Testing Tool to check the performance of a Moodle Instance

Abstract

This thesis describes in detail the development and implementation of Stress Testing Tool to check the performance of a Moodle instance. The main objective of this project is to develop a tool to test the performance of a Moodle instance/LMS by simulating multiple virtual users by considering four scenarios, and to record the vital information of the server such as CPU usage, RAM, disk input/output, bandwidth, SQL usage, maximum load can handle etc. to minimize the possible bottlenecks. Most of the existing tools for load testing support the creation of simple test cases consisting of a fixed sequence of operations. In this thesis it is presented a new approach to perform load testing of Moodle instance by simulating realistic user behavior. In order to give the generated load some variety or randomness it requires using dynamic URL concept to modify and parameterize these test cases manually. This is usually both time-consuming and difficult. In this thesis by simply doing simple changes to the URL it can be achieved. This thesis discusses four types of stress tests. User can do the simulation by using specified no of virtual users with (1).Single user login credential, (2).Multiple user logins credentials system generated users,(3).Multiple user logins credentials provided by a CSV file, (4).simulation with several load engines with multiple user login credentials. This approach is further can be improved by using several category of users in the simulation process and also testing from several geographical locations with multiple load engines. This tool also can be used as a preventive maintenance tool which can predict the system behavior to avoid and minimize downtime and keep the server and online applications running.