The CLIF Project

_{CLIF is a Load Injection Framework}

Lutece d'Or 2007 award for the best open source project made by a big company

Overview

CLIF is a sub-project of ObjectWeb JMOB project.
CLIF is a Java framework dedicated to performance testing of any kind of system reachable from a JVM. CLIF framework aims at supporting the deployment and control of:

distributed load injectors, responsible for load/traffic generation on the system under test;
as well as probes giving information about resource consumptions.

a view of CLIF distributed framework

CLIF will also come with test supervision features (including monitoring of response times, throughput, error rate, computing resource consumptions), and analysis tools.

Key features

3 user interfaces available: Swing-based GUI, Eclipse-based GUI, command line
low footprint probes available for CPU, memory, disks, network, JVM
graphical monitoring and execution control of all probes and load injectors
advanced, generic, extensible scenario definition environment ISAC, coming with:

a graphical editor
plug-ins for managing target protocols (HTTP, DNS, TCP, SIP, etc.) and miscellaneous utilities (counters, random timers, runtime parameter provisioning from an external data source...)
a powerful execution engine, able to manage a million virtual users and a million requests/second throughput per load injector (the actual limits depend on the computing overhead of the target protocol management)

Thanks to its formal representation of load scenarios (XML based), ISAC also enables real sessions record and replay features. For instance, the MaxQ project (maxq.tigris.org) delivers an HTTP proxy for recording web sessions that can be used to generate ISAC scenarios.

A Fractal architecture

To provide a flexible architecture, CLIF makes use of the Fractal component model. For example, load injectors and probes are components that can be defined, plugged in and (un-/re-)deployed at runtime. Thanks to the Fractal model, customizing CLIF does not require to know details about the whole framework, but only about a well-defined, reduced number of client and server interfaces.