Performance Testing Forum

Forum has a built-in security mechanism to ensure that malicious bots and scripts on the Internet do not flood your forums. However, if you want to load test a forum in order to find out exactly how many postings per second the forum can handle on your website with your JSP templates and server stack, then that is exactly what you want to do. For performance testing, therefore, you need to be able to circumvent this Forum security feature.

You can disable the security feature by setting a configuration parameter called /com/escenic/forum/ForumManager/performanceTestingAllowed to true.

To do this:

  1. Start a browser and go to the Content Engine's administration application by entering:

    http://host-name/escenic-admin

    in the address field (where host-name is the host name or IP address of your Content Engine host).

  2. Click on Component Browser to display the Content Engine's component browser application.

  3. Click down to the required component: com > escenic > forum > ForumManager.

  4. Click on performanceTestingAllowed in the displayed Properties table.

  5. Enter true in the New value field and click on Submit.

The security mechanism is now disabled and will remain disabled until you set /com/escenic/forum/ForumManager/performanceTestingAllowed back to false or until the Content Engine is restarted.

With the security mechanism disabled, you can use load testing tools such as siege to load test your forum installation.

It is of course also possible to set /com/escenic/forum/ForumManager/performanceTestingAllowed to true by editing the appropriate .properties file in a configuration layer. You are, however, strongly advised not to do this, since it carries the risk of forgetting to set the parameter back to false, and thus exposing your production system to real attacks.