This crate provides a workload generator that emulates the traffic to lobste.rs. It is a mostly open-loop benchmark similar to TailBench, but it also approximates the partly open-loop designed outlined in Open Versus Closed: A Cautionary Tale by having clients potentially issue more than one query per request.
The benchmarker main component is the "load generator". It generates requests according to
actual lobste.rs traffic patterns as reported in here, records
the request time, and sends the request description to an implementor of
Service<TrawlerRequest>. When the resulting future resolves, the generator logs how long the
request took to process, and how long the request took from when it was generated until it
was satisfied (this is called the sojourn time).
Trawler is written so that it can either be run against an instance of
the lobsters Rails app or
directly against a backend by issuing queries. The former is done using the provided binary,
whereas the latter is done by linking against this crate as a library an implementing the
Service trait. The latter allows benchmarking a data storage backend without also incurring
the overhead of the Rails frontend. Note that if you want to benchmark against the Rails
application, you must apply the patches in lobsters.diff first.