seed — specifies fixed seed for PRNG
<seed>INTEGER</seed>
During tests flood sometimes uses system PRNG (Pseudo Random
Number Generator). For example, this happens when you use
${=name}
construct. Since numbers returned by
PRNG are different for every test, you can have situation in
which the same set of URLS has very different results.
Consider retrieval of article from database with such url:
<url requesttemplate="http://www.example.com/show_art.php?id=${=aid}"/>
When you run the test for the first time, aid
evaluates to 6, and results in a 20 KB article. However at the
second run aid
evaluates to 216 which can
trigger a more complex query, or return a larger article (say
108 KB). You used the same config, but results are different.
If you use <seed> element with a fixed value (like 23,
48 or 84) you can expect PRNG to generate the same number with
every run.