perform performance test using multi-mechanize

gave multi-mechanize a try recently, when in-need of behavior analysis for an application on massive concurrent requests being sent to it

What? multi-mechanize is an OpenSource load testing framework written and configurable in Python. So either make calls to any web service or simple import and utilize any python-accessible API/service.
It's successor of an old Python load testing framework called Pylot.

Developed and maintained @GitHub

Install available through 'pip' too as
   $ pip install multi-mechanize
It also requires matplotlib library if you wanna view Graphs in the generated HTML report (or otherwise), BUT it's not mandatory as the framework would perform all tests fine with an import error for matplotlib.

This also follows a bit convention oriented run structure. We'll see how.

Before starting any performance check user is supposed to create a project using

$ multimech-newproject project_name

This creates a dir 'project_name' at place of execution with following dir-structure
./project_name
├── config.cfg
└── test_scripts
    └── v_user.py

here './project_name/config.cfg' mainly contains global configuration around the duration to run,

[global]
run_time = 30                # second duration for test to run, required field
rampup = 0                   # second duration for users to ramp-up, required field
results_ts_interval = 10  # second time series interval for result analysis, required field
progress_bar = on         # console progress bar on/off, default=on
console_logging = off    # console logging to standard ouput, default=off
xml_report = off            # xml/jtl report generation, default=off
# results_database = sqlite:///results.db ## optional component to push results to DB
# post_run_script = do_whatever.py ## to run any script to do anything on test completion 

[user_group-1]
threads = 3                  # number of threads to run the following script in
script = v_user.py        # the actual script that will be run to test, give any 

## similar more users with same/different threads and script values can be added with names like user_group-ANYTHING.

Now, to run this prepared project

$ multimech-run ./project_name

As I already mentioned it picks certain implementations by convention, most important to notice is the way user-group-script is to be prepared.
Basically it's to be a python script that can utilize all Python magic you know or install. But it need to have a 'Transaction' class with 'run' method.
When you run your project using multi-mechanize, it instantiates 'Transaction' class and keeps calling 'run' method in a loop...

Example user-script to test load at your 'python -m SimpleHTTPServer'

# v_user_server.py
import httplib


class Transaction(object):
    def run(self):
        conn = httplib.HTTPConnection('127.0.0.1:8000')
        conn.request('GET', '/')
        resp = conn.getresponse()
        conn.close() 

        assert ((resp.status / 400) == 0), 'BadResponse: HTTP %s' % resp.status
# finito file

Find the detailed scripting guide with plenty good examples here : http://testutils.org/multi-mechanize/scripts.html