WCAT : 404 Not Found in the log file

Question

To make my load tests, I followed any WCAT tutorial: 1. Install IIS 6.0 2. Create 3 config file (Configuration, Script, Distribution) whose formats followed strictly to the tutorial. 3. Invoke these configurations with wcctl command (such as: wcctl -c Configuration.cfg -d Distribution.cfg -s Script.cfg -a localhost 4. Invoke wcclient.exe (such as: wcclient localhost) However, results I received always have 200 Request OK = 0, but 404 Not Found occupied all. (Note: My URL in Script.cfg can be called successfully via browser, such as: http://localhost:2631/WebServices/XXX.svc/POX/MyMethod?param1=I1&param2=true). Anyone can tell me how to execute a valid WCAT run (200 OK, not 404 Not Found) ? I'd been searching but unable to find anything except this fuzzy thing: WCAT Problem Thanks

Answer 1

I'm rummaging around in weeds from 2012 here, but let me take a stab at it.

I recently ran into a similar issue where I was getting 404s for all page requests that were made by WCAT.

The solution in my case was simple: the request URLs in my WCAT script were all relative and I needed to change them to absolute URLs.

So instead of this:

request
{
  verb = GET;
  url = "/mypage.aspx";
}

I changed them to this:

request
{
  verb = GET;
  url = "http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.aspx";
}

PS: can anyone explain to me why the WCAT documentation always shows relative URLs in its examples and makes no reference to the fact that you can use absolute URLs? Further, the instructions insist that it is not a good idea to run WCAT on the same machine as your website is hosted on (because you'll throw off your results) but yet, all of their examples use relative URLs, which could only work if you were running WCAT on the same machine on which your website is hosted!

Edit

By the way, an alternative to setting the host in the URL as I showed above, you could also do this:

request
{
  verb = GET;
  url = "/mypage.aspx";

  setheader
  {
    name="Host";
    value="http://www.mydomain.com";
  }
}