re-name --workers to --agents??

[rpappalax]

@tarekziade, question for you....

In ailoads, we had the concept of a "user." From a testing perspective, this makes some sense because (via a loadtest), we're trying to pretend that we are 1 user doing some activity and multiplying that by some scale value: --users n. But it's not entirely intuitive what a "user" is and this could easily get confused with the --name parameter in loads-broker where we specify the username of the person running the tests.

In molotov, we've renamed that to "worker." This is better in one sense as it's more like a thread, but could easily be confused with the "process" parameter which is a thread of the async activity. A process is essentially a thread and a thread is sometimes also referred to as a "worker", so sometimes I find that a bit confusing.

The loadtesting tool: beeswithmachineguns refers to these "users"/"workers" as "concurrent connections":
https://github.com/igkins/beeswithmachineguns/blob/master/beeswithmachineguns/main.py#L100

We could rename "workers" to "connections", but in ap-loadtester, a connection is used to refer to an open websocket connection, whereas with molotov our "workers" are essentially agents and the connections may be established and terminated multiple times over the course of a test.
Should we call it an "agent" instead?

---

NOTE:

When doing a loads-broker test, these params would be added to the loads-broker.json so that your scale would be determined by:

molotov.json
(1) # processes
(2) # agents

loads-broker.json
(3) # attack nodes

TOTAL # AGENTS = # processes / node X # agents / node X # attack nodes

[tarekziade]

I agree the naming is fuzzy. I like the name of agents - in another tool they call it virtual-users

To make sure things are clear, right now:

• a process is a real OS process, where molotov is forked and a new program runs.
• a worker is a co-routine, that asynchronously calls the scenarii

so when you run with 5 processes and 10 workers, you end up with 50 workers running in parallel.
--agents sounds good as long as it's clear that it's not the total number of concurrent virtual users, but the total number of virtual user PER process.

TOTAL AGENTS = # agents x # processes x # nodes

[rpappalax]

so when you run with 5 processes and 10 workers, you end up with 50 workers running in parallel.
yea, that's my understanding as well.
--virtual-users (-u) is also quite good. I like the brevity of 'agents', but as you suggest it may still be too vague. i quite like 'virtual-users'. Though a bit long, it does give a very intuitive name to what it does. Whatever you think is best.

[tarekziade]

+1 for agent . As long as we have a clear doc about this, I think it's the best pick