# $Id$

  IDX-TSUNAMI README
  IDEALX

  ____________________________________________________________

  Table of Contents


  1. Introduction

     1.1 General
     1.2 What This Package Is

  2. Getting Things Installed

     2.1 Dependencies
     2.2 Compilation and Installation
     2.3 Problems/Bugs
     2.4 Platform Issues

  ______________________________________________________________________

  1.  Introduction

  1.1.  General

  This document gives pointers for information on this package which is
  distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (see file
  COPYING).

  1.2.  What This Package Is

  The purpose of this package is to simulate users in order to test
  the scalability and performances of IP based client/server
  applications. Currently, only the Jabber protocol has been
  implemented and tested, but it can be easily extended (see
  doc/Design.txt). IDX-TSUNAMI use the Erlang language.

  This tool can simulate thousands of users concurrently, and can be
  distributed on several client machines. Up to 10000 users can be
  simulated on a single machine (the limit depends on the hardware and
  also on the activity of the simulated clients).

  The idea is to simulate the behavior of a real world client using a
  stochastic model, in order to achieve a more realistic traffic than
  other simple models (deterministics).

  In this context, a client is characterize by:
      - the mean time elapsed between each request ("think time")
      - the number of requests during a session
      - the type and parameters of requests (including, for example,
        'chat' message size for Jabber)

  Another key parameter is the arrival rate of clients.

  In the current implementation, the client arrival rate and the user
  "think time" are represented by an exponential distribution
  (therefore, the arrival process is a Poisson process)

  The traffic can be logged to a file and, after completion of
  all the clients, these files can be analyzed by scripts to get
  useful measurements of responses time. An small script is furnished
  for the Jabber protocol (mean, median, standard variation, and so on
  are computed, for different types of messages: authentication,
  chat, offline messages ...)

  This software is currently under development and can be enhanced
  in many ways (see TODO file). 

  2.  Getting Things Installed

  2.1.  Dependencies
  
  - requires Erlang/OTP R7B-0 or up (tested with R7B-2)
    (http://www.erlang.org/download.html)

  - perl5 (if you want tu use the scripts)
	
  - gnuplot (optional; for graphical output with analyse_msg.pl script)

  2.2.  Compilation and Installation

  Edit Makefile and idx-tsunami.pl if you want to change the install
  path (/usr/local/idx-tsunami by default)

  Edit src/tsunami.rel.src if your Erlang version is not R7B-2 and set
  erts, kernel and stdlib version according to your Erlang
  distribution.

  make
  make install

  How to use it:
    1a/ Edit etc/idx-tsunamirc file (read the comments for explanation on
        the parameters)

    1b/ Read the doc/Jabber.txt file for Jabber-specific information.

    2/ use the script "idx-tsunami.pl --start" to launch the simulated clients.

    3/ When it's finished, you can use analyse_msg.pl to get
       statistical results from the logfiles (require at least 'light'
       monitoring, see comments in 'idx-tsunamirc' )
  
  2.3.  Problems/Bugs
 
  Submit bug reports/ask questions to the authors (see CONTRIBUTORS)
 
  2.4.  Platform Issues

  This package has only be tested on Linux. It should work
  on Erlang supported platforms (Solaris, *BSD)