Deploying Benchmarks

The Faban harness is exactly what it says it is - a harness for automation of benchmark runs. Without benchmarks deployed in the harness, it can barely do anything by itself. In order to demonstrate all the functionality of the Faban harness, we need to deploy a benchmark. For this purpose, we'll deploy the very simple benchmark sample called "Web101" that is distributed as part of the Faban kit.

You need to have Faban installed to continue following the guide. Please refer to Installation and Getting Started to get Faban installed and properly set up.

Please note that we do not discuss the benchmark deploy image and how to create it right here. This topic is covered in detail in the Faban Harness Developers Guide in the deployment section.

For now we will just use the deploy image in $FABAN_HOME/samples/web1/build/web1.jar. There are three ways to deploy a benchmark:

Upload

You can use a web browser to upload the benchmark deploy image (jar file). Point your web browser to http://<faban_host>:9980/deploy. Then either click browse to select the jar file or type the path to the jar file name. Finally, click deploy to upload the jar file. The following picture illustrates the deploy screen.

Copy

Alternatively, you can directly copy the deploy jar file into the $FABAN_HOME/benchmarks directory of the master. The jar file will be automatically deployed the next time Faban searches for deployed benchmarks.

Ant Deploy Task

The last way to deploy a benchmark, Faban provides an ant deploy task to deploy a benchmark into the Faban harness as part of the build and test cycle. This option is designed for use by developers and is discussed in the Faban Harness Developers Guide.

Conditions

For integrity of the benchmark runs, Faban will refuse to deploy if 1)there is a previous deployment of the same benchmark and 2) a run for this benchmark is scheduled/pending or in progress. In this case, you will have two choices:

1. Allow the runs to finish before attempting a deploy
2. Remove all runs of this benchmark from the run queue and cancel the current run if it is running this benchmark and redo the deploy.

If you deployed by copying the deploy jar file into $FABAN_HOME/benchmarks directory, the new jar file will not get deployed until these two conditions are met.