title: How would you stress test a dynamic site, when you don't know what the URLs will be ahead of time?
body: <p>This isn't a question of what stress testing tools are out there.  I'm afraid it's a lot harder than that. (At least for me)</p>
  
  <p>Consider a restful architecture for a forum or blog that generates random IDs for each post.  </p>
  
  <p>Simulating creating those topics/articles would be simple, because you'd just be posting form data to an endpoint like: <code>/article</code>, or <code>/topic</code></p>
  
  <p>But how do you then stress test commenting on those articles/topics?  This is different, because the comments need to belong to an article/topic, which means that you need the ids of those items. However, if all you can do is issue posts, and you have no way of pulling those ids, you'd be unable to create them.  </p>
  
  <p>I'm creating a site that is similar in this regard, and I have no idea how to stress test the creation of the comments.  </p>
  
  <p>I have two ideas, and they're both pretty awful:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Generate a massive system ahead of time with some kind of factory, and then freeze it.  From there, I figure I'd have to use some kind of browser automation to create my 'comments' on all of this.  The automation would I suppose go through a recording proxy, like what JMeter offers.  Then, to run the test, I reload the database, and replay the massive log file.</li>
  <li>Use browser automation for the whole thing, taking advantage of the dynamic links delivered in the HTML page.  The only option here would be Selenium, and really, we're talking a massive selenium grid that would be extremely expensive. Probably very difficult to maintain also.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Option 2 is completely infeasible near as I can tell, but option 1 sounds excruciating.  I'm really hoping someone can suggest something more clever.</p>