Performance testing on ftp servers

    FTP servers used to be very popular in the 90's, they are still in use nowadays, but mainly to serve large contents, especially software packages.   Browsers support them by default so you may not even notice it when you trigger a ftp transaction by clicking a link.   In this blog, we will cover performance testing on ftp servers.

    NetGend platform supports all the ftp transactions: ls, get and put ....

    First, let's look at an example on uploading a file to a server.   Suppose we need to upload a local file  "users.csv" to a remote file "tmp.txt" in the directory of "www/test".   Here is the simple script.

 function VUSER() {  
      connect("ftp.example.com", 21);  
      action(ftp, login, "jsmith", "abc123");  
      action(ftp, op, "cd", "www/test");   
      action(ftp, op, "pwd");  
      ftp.data = readFile("users.csv");  
      action(ftp, op, "put", "tmp.txt");  
 }  

     Pretty obvious, isn't it?   Note that in the above script, the variable "ftp.data" holds the data to be sent to ftp server.  You can dynamically generate the data if you want.

    The operations "ls" and "get" are even simpler:

 action(ftp, op, "ls");   
 //ftp.recvedData will hold the output of "ls".  

 action(ftp, op, "get", "tmp.txt");   
 //ftp.recvedData will hold the output of content of remote file "tmp.txt"  

    What's interesting here is,  after the operation, the variable "ftp.recvedData" will hold the output of the operation. In the case of the "ls" operation, it's the directory listing, in the case of the "get" operation, it's the content of the downloaded file.  You can do all the operations on this variable, such as, use regexp to grab certain fields and use them in the next ftp operations.

    Of course, the following operations are supported.  They are fairly straight forward.

action(ftp, op, "del", "temp.txt"); 

action(ftp, op, "bye"); 

action(ftp, op, "pwd"); 

     FTP lost to HTTP because ftp is simpler than HTTP - it doesn't have the fancy extensions of HTTP.   So let's keep performance testing on FTP simple too.