Distributed Testing of WSSE Webservice Calls

Question

For an application, I need to do a load test for a web service which is secured with WS-Security Username/Password. We need to test for 5000 concurrent unique users which call the web service at the same time.

I did some research for a tool which provides the ability to do this and I found Grinder, JMeter, and SOAPUI.

I like the Grinder approach of using scripts, but I am not sure if I can use WSSE Username token with Grinder. My idea is to write 5000 Scripts (or better: Write a tool which writes me 5000 scripts ;) ) and distribute it to the Amazon EC2 cloud. The Grinder documentation for this approach is very thin. So I am not sure if I can achieve this with Grinder.

Another idea is to use SOAPUI and LoadUI. I could utilize SOAPUI to generate the Webservice test cases and then load it to LoadUI. This works, but I fear, that LoadUI cannot handle 5000 Runners the same time.

Does anyone have experience with this kind of testing or do you have a recommendation which tool to use for this job?

Answer 1

• I haven't used Grinder, so I shant speak to it.
• I found LoadUI's interface to be bulky and confusing. I ultimately abandoned it for Jmeter.
• SoapUI was great for getting the SOAP requests and pretty good at customizing scripts once you figure out the tool. It has a medium learning curve. SoapUI has built-in load testing which is pretty decent.
• Jmeter has a high learning curve, but gives a lot of flexibility. However, it is NOT elegant for generating soap requests. If you don't already know what the soap request should be, you're out of luck. I used SoapUI free version to generate the SoapRequest and copied it into Jmeter.