server testing

[Peter Pincus]

Hi,

is there any way to test server load ? We need to test server load for
severall scenarios. Any hint would be very appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

--
pp

[Julian Leviston]

What do you mean by server load?

As it is based around how much of the processor is being used, usually you use server tools of some kind to do this, not the development framework of a web application.

Perhaps you mean some simple metric like hits per second to certain parts of the web app you're developing or something else?

Regards,
Julian.

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[Peter Pincus]

Hi Julian,

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 12:55 AM, Julian Leviston <jul...@leviston.net> wrote:
> What do you mean by server load?
>
> As it is based around how much of the processor is being used, usually you use server tools of some kind to do this, not the development framework of a web application.
>
> Perhaps you mean some simple metric like hits per second to certain parts of the web app you're developing or something else?

yes, we'd like to know how many requests our app can deal with before
getting sluggish. Something like measure the number of hits per
second. Which tools can we use to teste this ? Are there any metrics
around ? Basically we want to know that this server configuration can
handle xyz amount of users interacting with the application, so that
we can provision for hardware for 50, for 100 and for 200 users.

[Julian Leviston]

You can do a simple stress test by using apache bench at various levels and then trying to use the app - of course it won't show you real world usage.

This isn't much to do with the development environment, though... and it all depends on the deployment environment you use... so it's pretty useless doing stress testing without having something to stress test, really.

For example, one of our apps fell over when a certain page wasn't paginated, but not others... but we had no way of knowing that this particular page was going to be an issue until it was an issue - then it took a couple of hours to roll a change that fixed the issue until we rolled pagination... (which didn't take very long because we were using Ruby).

Deployment is pretty much a huge topic... it's not something someone can help you with in a single email, and I'm pretty sure you'll only find people willing to help you if you provide them with some money.

Julian.

[Peter Pincus]

Julian,

thanks, I'll be testing with some of these tools:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbmonster/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/httperf/

best regards,
--
pp