Shared-Mode Resource Allocation for Cloud-Based Load Testing

Abstract

Resource allocation is essential for cloud-based load testing. The existing techniques use coarse-grained resource allocation methods with an entire virtual machine occupied by a single test task for cloud-based load testing. The idle resources in a virtual machine are unable to be used by other load testing tasks. This may result in uneconomical use of test resources and increase test costs. To optimize the use of test resources, this paper presents a shared-mode resource allocation method for cloud-based load testing. The method shares client-side virtual machine resources among load testing tasks. It takes minimizing resource redundancy, test execution cost, and network communication cost as optimization objectives of resource allocation, with the assurance of enough test resources as a basic constraint. We introduce a multiobjective optimization algorithm to create an optimized resource allocation plan for load testing tasks within a time window. The experiments show that the proposed method can reduce resource demands for load testing and thereby save the test costs. INDEX TERMS cloud testing, load testing, test resource allocation, multi-objective optimization.