Testing with a Cloudflare waiting room enabled

[DominicWatson]

Is it possible to script a scenario where a request will be retried when encountering either rate limiting or something like a Cloudflare waiting room response?

Currently in my scenario, the VU will just fail and exit the scenario early when running into these - I'd like it to keep retrying in order to emulate a real user attempting to get through the task they want to achieve.

My scenario is just a single flow that is an array of simple GETs and POSTs. On any one of those, I'd like the request to be retried after a short pause IF they encounter a certain response code.

[hassy]

Yes should be possible with a bit of custom JS if not something else - what would the check for whether the waiting room is active or not look like?

[hassy]

Looks straightforward enough - could a 429 be returned for any request in the scenario?

[DominicWatson]

As a brutal try, I'm trying this:

var request = require('sync-request');

module.exports = {
    waitingRoomCheck: waitingRoomCheck
}

function waitingRoomCheck(context, ee, next) {
	request( "GET", context.vars.target, {
		  retry       : true
		, retryDelay  : 10000
		, maxRetries  : 30
	} );

	return next();
}

...
beforeScenario: "waitingRoomCheck"

It could be any request, but once you are through the waiting room, you should be able to proceed as normal - so doing this at the beginning of the scenario should work hopefully :)

[hassy]

Yep, that should work! Just having a look at what it would take to add the ability to retry on any request - not quite as straightforward as I would've hoped but should be doable as a first-class feature for the next release 🤞 It's a pretty common scenario!

[DominicWatson]

Fab, that would be great :). This totally works btw and my load scenario working a treat.

[DominicWatson]

This is actually proving a little trickier and the solution I provided above does not work because the session cookies in the request are not persisted to the scenarios VUsers. I'm currently using something like this with some success:

flow:
  # first loop a request to homepage while responsecode is our waiting room code
  - loop:
      - get:
          url: '/?c={{ $loopCount }}'
          afterResponse: captureResponseCode
      - think: 5
    whileTrue: rateLimitCheck
  
 # then carry on with our flow as expected
  get:
     url: ...

Javascript

module.exports = {
    rateLimitCheck: rateLimitCheck,
    captureResponseCode: captureResponseCode
}

function rateLimitCheck( context, next ) {
	return next( Number( context.vars.rateLimitCheck ) === 202 ); // I configured the waiting room to return 202
}

function captureResponseCode( req, res, context, ee, next ) {
	context.vars.rateLimitCheck = res.statusCode;
	return next();
}

I'm wondering whether or not there is a cleaner way to do the capture. I couldn't find any documented way to do a capture in the yaml and get the response status code.