Flex Article

Performance Testing Flex Applications That Use AMF

There comes a time for every project to transition from development to deployment. Yes, it is time to go live and watch dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of people enjoy your application.

This is a wonderful and terrible feeling at the same time. What user load can your application handle? What are the performance characteristics you can expect as user load increases? These are realistic questions and are absolutely critical to investigate before going live. Luckily, there are many tools out there that can help you make sure everything performs well under increasing user loads.

While you have a lot of options for generating load on your server and monitoring the result of that load, the most comprehensive and capable tools come from automated-testing tool vendors such as Segue, Mercury, and IBM Rational. Each vendor offers capable performance testing tools, allowing you to performance-test your Flex application to the fullest, whether your application uses web services, XML, or HTTP connections. However, only Segue goes the extra mile to provide AMF (Action Message Format) support in their performance testing tool.

In this article, I use Segue Silk Performer to demonstrate the basics of performance testing your Flex application, focusing on AMF integration because so many Flex applications use AMF. However, the techniques discussed here apply to any performance testing tool, as long as it supports the protocol you are using.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Segue Silk Performer

• Request Evaluation Copy

Restaurant Finder Application

• Read About and Install

Flex (not required)

• Try
• Buy

Related Article

• Learning Flex Basics (Part 1): Creating Your First Flex Application by Robert Crooks

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