trawler-rs

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.