corda/tools/jmeter

JMeter for controlling CORDA performance runs

This module contains gradle tasks to make running the JMeter (http://jmeter.apache.org) load generation tool against Corda nodes much easier and more useful. It does this by providing a simple way to launch JMeter with the actual JMeter install coming from downloaded dependencies, and by providing some Samplers that interact with the Corda node via RPC.

Running via the interactive GUI

To run up the JMeter UI, using the jmeter.properties in the resources folder, type the following:

./gradlew tools:jmeter:run

You can then open the example script in "Example Flow Properties.jmx" via the File -> Open menu option. You need to configure the host, ports, user name and password in the Java Sampler that correspond to your chosen target Corda node. Simply running from the UI will result in the RPC client running inside the UI JVM.

If you wish to pass additional arguments to JMeter, you can do this:

./gradlew tools:jmeter:run -PjmeterArgs="['-n', '-Ljmeter.engine=DEBUG']"

The intention is to run against a remote Corda node or nodes, hosted on servers rather than desktops. To this end, we leverage the JMeter ability to run remote agents that actually execute the tests, with these reporting results back to the UI (or headless process if you so desire - e.g. for automated benchmarks). This is supplemented with some additional convenience of automatically creating ssh tunnels to the remote nodes (we don't want the JMeter ports open to the internet) in coordination with the jmeter.properties. The remote agents then run close to the nodes, so the latency of RPC calls is minimised.

A Capsule (http://www.capsule.io) based launchable JAR is created that can be run with the simple command line

java -jar jmeter-corda-<version>.jar

Embedded in the JAR is all of the corda code for flows and RPC, as well as the jmeter.propeties. This JAR will also include a properties file based on the hostname in the JMeter configuration, so we allocate different SSH tunneled port numbers this way.

SSH Tunnels

To launch JMeter with the tunnels automatically created:

./gradlew tools:jmeter:run -PjmeterHosts="['hostname1', 'hostname2']"

The list of hostnames should be of at least length one, with a maximum equal to the length of the remote_hosts option in jmeter.properties. We effectively "zip" together the hostnames and that list to build the SSH tunnels. The remote_hosts property helps define the ports (the hosts should always be local) used for each host listed in jmeterHosts. Some additional ports are also opened based on some other parts of the configuration to access the RMI registry and to allow return traffic from remote agents.

The SSH tunnels can be started independently with:

./gradlew tools:jmeter:runSsh -PjmeterHosts="['hostname1', 'hostname2']"

For the ssh tunneling to work, an ssh agent must be running on your local machine with the appropriate private key loaded. If the environment variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK is set, the code assumes that a posix sshagent process is being used, if it is not set, it assumes that Pageant is in use. If the remote user name is different from the current user name, -XsshUser <remote user name> can be used to set this, or in the gradle call:

./gradlew tools:jmeter:runSsh -PjmeterHosts="['hostname1', 'hostname2']" -PsshUser="'username'"

Running locally with driver

To run up 3 nodes (2 nodes, 1 non-validating notary) locally for testing anything in the perftestcordapp (e.g. samplers, custom flows), you can use gradle to run:

./gradlew tools:jmeter:runDriver

This uses the driver test infrastructure to fire up the nodes. See StartLocalPerfCorDapp for X500 names of nodes, RPC user logins etc. The RPC port of Bank A is typically 10004, but they are all reporting in the console output. A sample JMeter config for this setup has been included as LocalIssueAndPay Request.jmx under resources.

Running in non-interactive test/batch mode

To run Jmeter in performance test mode, we want to run a predefined test without starting the UI and record the results in a csv file. In order to do this, additional arguments need to be passed to JMeter. Using gradle, the command line would look something like this:

./gradlew tools:jmeter:run -PjmeterArgs="['-n', '-t', 'build/resources/main/Testplans/CashIssuance_40k.jmx', '-l', 'CashIssuance_40k.jtl', '-R', '127.0.0.1:20100']" -PjmeterHosts="['perf-node-4.corda.r3cev.com']"

The interesting bit here are the jmeterArgs:

• -n tells JMeter to run non-interactively
• -t <filename> loads the testplan to run
• -l <filename> specifies the output to write to (if it exists, it will be appended)
• -R <hostname:port> specifies the host to run against - note this is localhost in this case as we are using ssh tunnels to reach the test nodes.