I have an XPC server running on macOS and want to perform comprehensive performance and load testing to evaluate its efficiency, responsiveness, and scalability. Specifically, I need to measure factors such as request latency, throughput, and how well it handles concurrent connections under different load conditions.
What are the best tools, frameworks, or methodologies for testing an XPC service? Additionally, are there any best practices for simulating real-world usage scenarios and identifying potential bottlenecks?
I’m not aware of any specific mechanism for profiling XPC performance. However, we have a lot of great performance monitoring tools, and those should work for XPC as well as they work for anything else. I recommend that you start with Instruments.
You tagged your thread with Endpoint Security, which suggests that you’re doing XPC work in your ES client. My general advice is to not do that, and instead move more of the logic into the ES client itself. If your ES client deals with high-frequency events, any IPC on the hot path is going to be too much.
Even if you can’t move all the logic to your ES client, you should aim for the hot path to stay within your ES client. For example, your ES client could cache the data it needs to respond to the most frequent events.
Profiling your ES client directly is going to be challenging. It’d be better to isolate your XPC client and server code into a test harness that you can then profile reproducibly. Which brings me to:
best practices for simulating real-world usage scenarios
I would use a tracing approach here. That is, create an ES client that records the events that it sees then use that save traces of typical user activities. When it comes to profiling, build a dummy ES client that plays back those traces. That’ll give you a real world scenario that you can profile in a reproducible way.
Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"