web stuff

Unfortunately, I have been unable to participate much on the list recently. I finally got my book Rebol the Official Guide and it looks really great so far. They even talk about strange context behavior right at the start! That's a good sign that it's not just for dummies. The installation/unzip instructions are brutally detailed, though. I have been trying out some Load Testing software for our web app, because of course it works fine here but when 200+ users hit our software simultaneously, it slows down and then sometimes just hangs IIS permanently. I tried finding some products on the web that do load testing but one didn't work for our app and the other, Astra, costs $30,000+ for about 250+ simultaneous virtual user load emulation. That's not within my present budget. So I thought that Rebol might make a very good toolkit for doing Load Testing. I thought why not record with the http proxy in Rebol, and then play it back later with a vuser emulator also made with Rebol. Of course it would have to be able to handle session ids for IIS (temporary cookie). By the way, the cookies-client.r is giving me trouble. there are documentation mistakes, redundancies, and inflexible code, and it doesn't fetch binary files like .jpg properly because of mishandling of cr lf chars, etc. - does anybody have a proper version that works or does anybody want to have a go at improving the blasted thing? For instance, what the heck is the actual purpose of cookie-data2? Why are there two and not many (a block)? Where is an actual example of use of each of these? Is the cookie stuff supposed to be built into Rebol, or do you have to get down and dirty with the http protocol internals? Finally, when I was testing the proxy.r program, I noticed that it seemed to work for simple pages with few graphics, but the minute I access a web-page with several icons as gifs or jpgs, such as our main menu, most of these images are not getting retrieved from the server. I think the connections are being closed as soon as the browser or the server creates an event that takes it out of waiting on the connection, but the data retrieved is length zero. The program then closes it's side of the connection and also closes its proxy partner connection. Let's hear it for the coitus interruptus jokes. I don't know if keep-alive stuff needs to be added to proxy.r to be a proper proxy or what, but if I can't fix that I really can't use Rebol for Load Testing, which would be an aweful shame. Any help would be much appreciated!! Thanks! -Galt

Just replying to one bit.

> By the way, the cookies-client.r is giving me trouble. > there are documentation mistakes, redundancies, and inflexible > or do you have to get down and dirty with the http protocol > internals?