Installing and running shinycannon

Source: vignettes/shinycannon.Rmd

Installation

shinycannon requires custom installation that differs from platform to platform.

Linux

Depending on your distribution, shinycannon can be installed using one of the following packages.

Distribution Download Link Install Command
Redhat/Fedora/CentOS shinycannon-1.1.3-dd43f6b.x86_64.rpm sudo yum install -y shinycannon-1.1.3-dd43f6b.x86_64.rpm
SUSE shinycannon-1.1.3-suse-dd43f6b.x86_64.rpm zypper —-no-gpg-checks install -y shinycannon-1.1.3-suse-dd43f6b.x86_64.rpm
Ubuntu/Debian shinycannon_1.1.3-dd43f6b_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i shinycannon_1.1.3-dd43f6b_amd64.deb

macOS

  1. Install Java
  2. Download shinycannon-1.1.3-dd43f6b.sh
  3. Install with sudo cp shinycannon-1.1.3-dd43f6b.sh /usr/local/bin/shinycannon; sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/shinycannon
  4. Run shinycannon -h to see help output, or shinycannon [RECORDING-PATH] [APP-URL] to generate load.

Windows

  1. Install Java
  2. Download shinycannon-1.1.3-dd43f6b.jar to the directory you wish to run it in
  3. Run java -jar shinycannon-1.1.3-dd43f6b.jar -h to see help output, or java -jar shinycannon-1.1.3-dd43f6b.jar [RECORDING-PATH] [APP-URL] to generate load.

Recording

shinycannon accepts two required positional arguments:

  1. [RECORDING-PATH]: path to the file produced by shinyloadtest::record_session
  2. [APP-URL]: URL of the target Shiny application

In addition to these two required arguments, shinycannon accepts a number of optional arguments that can be specified with flags. Of these, the most interesting are:

  1. --workers: The number of concurrent users to simulate. shinycannon uses threads to represent each user. It defaults to 1.
  2. --loaded-duration-minutes: The duration of the load test, in minutes. This does not include “warmup time”, which is the time shinycannon spends gradually increasing the number of workers, or “cooldown time”, which is the time spent decreasing the number of workers. It defaults to 0, meaning that after all workers have “warmed up”, they will immediately begin to “cool down”. Generally, you’ll want to set this to a duration greater than 0. shinycannon will re-run the recording as necessary to fill the time.
  3. --output-dir: Name of the directory to create and store timing information in.

As an example, to run a load test simulating 5 concurrent users for at least 2 minutes, outputting to the directory run1:

$ shinycannon recording.log https://shinyapp.example.com/ --workers 5 --loaded-duration-minutes 2 --output-dir run1
2018-08-29 15:06:14.191 INFO [progress] - Running: 0, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:06:14.193 INFO [thread01] - Warming up
2018-08-29 15:06:14.195 INFO [thread00] - Waiting for warmup to complete
2018-08-29 15:06:19.193 INFO [progress] - Running: 1, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:06:24.194 INFO [progress] - Running: 1, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:06:29.083 INFO [thread02] - Warming up
2018-08-29 15:06:29.195 INFO [progress] - Running: 1, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:06:34.195 INFO [progress] - Running: 2, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:06:39.196 INFO [progress] - Running: 2, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:06:43.973 INFO [thread03] - Warming up
2018-08-29 15:06:44.196 INFO [progress] - Running: 2, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:06:49.196 INFO [progress] - Running: 3, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:06:54.201 INFO [progress] - Running: 3, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:06:58.862 INFO [thread04] - Warming up
2018-08-29 15:06:59.201 INFO [progress] - Running: 3, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:07:04.201 INFO [progress] - Running: 4, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:07:09.202 INFO [progress] - Running: 4, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:07:13.751 INFO [thread05] - Warming up
2018-08-29 15:07:13.752 INFO [thread00] - Maintaining for 2 minutes (120000 ms)
2018-08-29 15:07:14.202 INFO [progress] - Running: 4, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:07:19.202 INFO [progress] - Running: 5, Failed: 0, Done: 0
2018-08-29 15:07:24.202 INFO [progress] - Running: 5, Failed: 0, Done: 0
...

shinycannon includes detailed help documentation explaining the other arguments:

shinycannon -h

During the test, shinycannon reports the progress and number of simulated users. The result of the test is an output directory (run1 in the example above) which includes timing information for each session. Inside that directory you’ll find:

  • recording.log: a copy of the original recording used.
  • detail.log: log output, to help debug errors.
  • ./sessions/*.csv: one file for each simulated user session.