Frequently Asked Questions

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Do I need to pay for this? How much?

Yes, FriendRunner is a commercial service and you do need to pay for it. Besides our time and effort, we need some serious computational power to test your application. All of that costs money.

How much you need to pay depends on many factors: How long do you want to test? How many virtual users will you need? Are you using Flash components, and can they be emulated (things like this determine how many virtual users we can run on one of our servers).

We like to understand our customers and how we can help them better. The more info we have, the better our service will be. Still interested in FriendRunner? Start here.

Why can't I just deploy my app on Facebook and run my favorite load testing tool?

Good question. It all comes down to two things: You can't control enough Facebook users to run a meaningful load test. You also can't hook a load test tool up to the Facebook servers because it will look like a Denial-of-Service attack and violates the Facebook TOU. It's all explained much more eloquently here.

Do I need to change my application to test it through FriendRunner?

No, the code that you test with should be the code that you deploy. The one small change that you do need to make however, is the Facebook secret that is generated for you when you register your application with Facebook, and is used for authentication. Revealing this secret to a third party violates Facebook's Terms of Use, so you should temporarily change yours to a value we'll provide.

What's the maximum number of virtual users I can run a test with?

We designed FriendRunner to scale well so that developers could run large load tests with it. We are not aware of any limitation on the maximum number of virtual users.

Can I define the types of virtual users I want to test with?

Sure, let us know what you'd like and we can easily create it. For instance if you want users primarily from a geographical area, or users from a certain demographic, we can do that. Facebook used to limit the number of friends that a person could have to 5,000, but that limitation no longer exists. There are now some people with considerably more friends than that, and these people often create trouble for applications that look at the user's friends. We can even create users who are friends with everyone (Santa??).

Can you simulate <some erroneous condition> that my app encountered when it called a Facebook API?

Absolutely. During the processing of your request, the Facebook servers may go down, require data that no longer exists, or run into a bug. All of these things will mean error codes passed back to your application, or maybe no response at all. In any event, you want your application to be as robust as possible, and react to these conditions in the best possible way (i.e. not crashing itself). FriendRunner will allow you to recreate any situation that you'd like to test with.