solution for concurrent testing on multiple servers

[cjokomay]

i work for a company that develops and hosts hundreds of applications.
it is my team's job to monitor these apps and make sure that they are
always up and running properly.

i have a testing box which runs a web server that hosts a status page
for each app. on each status page there is a button that says "start
health check" and when that button is clicked it fires off a watir
script that runs through a series of tests for the specified app.

this works until i have to run a bunch of tests at the same time. some
of the apps run on multiple servers, so we need to test each one
individually. for instance we have one app that runs in 8 different
regions (and therefore 8 different servers), in order to test that app
i need to kick off a watir script for each server. if i kick off all 8
scripts at the same time they seem to trip over each other for some
reason and they don't complete. so, i need to schedule them to kick
off about 5 seconds apart, but then you're looking at waiting 40
seconds just for all 8 tests to start running (not to mention someone
else could kick off another test at the same time).

we used to run less complicated apps and therefore i could use
www::mechanize to test them (that worked great), but now most of the
apps that we are testing are running tons of javascript and so i had
to start using watir. i'm not complaining though, i love working with
watir, i just wish i could figure out a way for everything to run a
bit more seamlessly.

so, basically what i am asking is is watir the right tool for this
job, and is there a better way to run multiple tests concurrently? the
example i found which uses multiple threads to run concurrent tests
seems more like a stress test than what i am looking for, but perhaps
i am wrong.

thanks in advance.

[Željko Filipin]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 7:40 AM, cjokomay <cjok...@gmail.com> wrote:
> this works until i have to run a bunch of tests at the same time.

Do applications you test have pop ups?

Željko
--
WatirPodcast.com/5

[cjokomay]

sure do (javascript confirmations). and i believe that is the main
problem (which is what you're probably getting at).

On Sep 9, 3:29 am, "Željko Filipin" <zeljko.fili...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Željko Filipin]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 9:54 AM, cjokomay <cjok...@gmail.com> wrote:
> sure do (javascript confirmations). and i believe that is the main
> problem (which is what you're probably getting at).

True, I think pop up handling code could cause the confusion.

Željko