W3C BUGS

Conformance and Performance Testing

One of the important design goals of the W3C Reference Library is that it must conform to the current specifications of the Web model, for example for HTTP.  This page gives an overview of what tests we have available and what we are working on. We have divided the tests the following four categories:

Basic core test suite
In order to make sure that the basic parts of the Libray conforms to the current specifications, we have developed a set of basic tools.
Stress and Regresion tests
It is important to test the Library code under stress - that is - in an environment with limited resources. This can for example be the number of available socket descriptors, lack of virtual memory, disk space etc. We have a set of example applications that can serve to do the stress testing:

The test should also include testing of a well-known test base where we can perform regression tests on.

Performance testing
Even though performance is not the most important factor in the W3C reference code, we need to be aware of the problem as demos only work in practice if they run reasonaly smooth. We have some first results available and more will come.
Platform dependent testing
We should select a small set of main platforms for tesing platform dependencies. In all other cases we should rely on external help for doing the test.


Henrik Frystyk, libwww@w3.org, February 1996