Name

seed — specifies fixed seed for PRNG

synopsis

<seed>INTEGER</seed>

parent elements

                    <flood>
                

children elements

none.

attributes

none.

character data

fixed seed for PRNG.

description

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.

examples

   <seed>23</seed>