Advice and Tips for Stress Testing Faye

[ninet...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I'm looking for a way to stress test Faye. Currently I'm running Faye on Node.js along with an HTTP backend API service powered by Django on a micro EC2 instance. I offload all the realtime functionality over to Node.js, while my API service handles all the REST functionality. I have a very simple setup where user makes a HTTP request to Django, Django does some processing and notifies Node.js + Faye of the request, Faye alerts all the subscribers listening on the channel specified by the HTTP request, pretty simple stuff on the Node.js side since its all downstream.

I want to test this functionality in a real world setting but before I do I was curious as to what tools I should use to simulate "x" number of  users subscribed to a channel.  Are there any tools that I can use to do something like this? And a more low level question, should I be adjusting the number of file descriptors on my local machine I'm using to simulate the users and also adjust it on the ec2 server as well? What sort of things should I be looking for when stress testing?

Thank you for taking the time to read my concerns. I appreciate any feedback and tips you can offer.