set multiple clients, one server on the same laptop

Question

I set up node.js on my laptop and I am testing.

I need to test a scenario where server sends data to all the clients and another scenario where server sends data to a specific client.

How can I emulate "many clients - one server" on my laptop, before I publish the project ?

Opening many different browsers (IE,Firefox,Chrome) and connecting them on the same URL will do the trick , or I need a special set-up or software?

Thanks

Are you talking about benchmarking a server against many clients? [ab](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12732182/ab-load-testing) would be good solution. — edin-m, Dec 22 '15 at 19:40
@EdinM. Is ab just for apache? Because I specified nodejs on my original post — user2860857, Dec 22 '15 at 21:35
It's command line, can be used for any server. So client must be ```node.js``` ? — edin-m, Dec 22 '15 at 21:36

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 22 '15 at 15:50

You can create your server and then other node scripts that connect to the server via a http request. Here is an example how you can connect to a node server API:

var http = require('http'); 
   var options = {
                port: 80,
                path: '/path/yourMethod/?Parameter1=7&Parameter2=8',
                method: 'GET',
            };

            var req = http.request(options, function(res) {
                res.on('data', function (data) {
                    data = JSON.parse(data);
                    console.log(data);
                });
            });

You need to include the http package for that.

So you can connect to the server and emulate clients. Hope that helped.

Yes, but this is just a part of an http node server, the basic one. My problem is how to virtually have many clients talking with the same server , on the same physical laptop. — user2860857, Dec 22 '15 at 16:31

set multiple clients, one server on the same laptop

1 Answers1