soapUI Load Test Thread Strategy

In soapUI, performance or load testing of web services can be done using different load testing strategies. A high level idea on this can be viewed in my earlier post "Web services Load Test Using soapUI". In this soapUI tutorial for load testing, we will discuss the use of "Thread Strategy" available in  soapUI. The main configuration settings available in soapUI load testing Thread Strategy are "Start Threads", "End Threads" and the "Limit". Now lets see one by one in detail.

• Start Threads : We have to mention the number of threads we need when we start our soapUI load/ performance test.
• End Threads : This is where we set the number of threads we expect at the end of our soapUI load/ performance test.
• Limit : We can configure this in 3 ways, either we can set the duration of the load test in seconds, or we can set the total number of runs the soapUI test case needs to be executed as part of the load/ performance test. The other option available is Runs per thread, here we can control the total number of time the soapUI test case will be executed on each thread.

Lets see an example on soapUI Load Test - Thread Strategy

Say we want to do our load test for 5 minutes with a starting thread count of 1 and ending thread count of 10, then our configaration should be like below.

Start Threads : 1
End Threads : 10
Limit : 300 seconds

soapUI will start load test with 1 thread and increase the thread count in equal intervals to reach the thread count to 10 until the time limit of 300 seconds are reached.