Artillery: Enhancement - Asynchronous requests

[damon-kreft]

Firstly, great work on Artillery.

Secondly, there doesn't seem to be a way to simulate asynchronous requests. E.g. our React app makes 5 asynchronous calls after initialisation that don't depend on each other and we of course wish to simulate this real-world scenario for each virtual user.

Therefore something like...

scenarios:
  - name: "My Scenario"
    flow:
      - get:
          url: "/profile/basic"
          async: true
      - get:
          url: "/transactions/recent/{{ accoundId }}"
          async: true
      - get:
          url: "/transactions/pending/{{ accoundId }}"
          async: true
      - get:
          url: "/accountsummary/{{ accoundId }}"
          async: true

or

scenarios:
  - name: "My Scenario"
    flow:
      - async:
        - get:
            url: "/profile/basic"
        - get:
            url: "/transactions/recent/{{ accoundId }}"
        - get:
            url: "/transactions/pending/{{ accoundId }}"
         - get:
            url: "/accountsummary/{{ accoundId }}"

I appreciate there is then this issue of one async call depending on the result of another async call, so perhaps...

scenarios:
  - name: "My Scenario"
    flow:
      - get:
          id: "profile"
          url: "/profile/basic"
          async: true
      - get:
          waitFor: "profile"
          url: "/transactions/recent/{{ accoundId }}"
          capture:
            json: "$.id"
            as: "id"

Happy to contribute.

[hassy]

This is something that has been asked for before (e.g. https://github.com/shoreditch-ops/artillery/issues/164). Thinking about it now, I think I would prefer having an async block rather than marking individual requests as async. The entire async block should be treated as a step, i.e. the flow does not progress on to the next action until all async requests are completed. Introducing dependencies between async calls is an overkill IMO - if one request depends on the response of another, it should simply follow it in the flow. Of course I appreciate that it might not work for every scenario, but I'm not sure the tradeoff between complexity and making a scenario more realistic would be worth it at this point.

[damon-kreft]

Thanks @hassy. Cool, yeah, that makes absolute sense.

I think an async block (treated essentially as a Promise.all()) with the ability to capture results for the next step as normal, covers all cases I can imagine.

Is it worth me attempting to contribute or something you wish to add to your own roadmap?

[hassy]

Implemented and will be available in the next release of Artillery.