Ask HN: Proper Way of Load Testing and Good Tools?

9 points·reader_1000··7 comments

Hi,

Which load testing tools do you suggest for web application performance and capacity measuring. What is the best practices or proper way of doing load testing? Could you please share your experience? Thanks.

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There are some very good, very expensive machines for this.

Open-source wise, there's Tsung: http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/

FWIW I'm not sure if it's good practice or not. I used locust.io recently. The client allowed me to ramp up request rates until I got HTTP Errors. I measured against their previous analytic sites. Of course this was a guesstimate because GA doesn't let you see the max num of simultaneous users. I found holes in the infrastructure that need to be remedied. The holes were to prevent anything similar to a slashdot effect. I also watched against the servers IO/CPU utlization, and RAM.

You can get a lot of mileage out of Apache Bench[1].

[1] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html

Thanks for suggestion. How do you plan test case scenarios and how do you interpret them? There was an article stating that developers just use powers of 10 when doing performance tests but that does not necessarily give correct results.

For a naive test, powers of ten work alright. Generally I increase the number requests until it tops out. Lets say your app takes 200ms and you can handle 1000 reqs/sec, you can use that as a baseline to determine whether you need to throw more hardware at it or work on improving the software.

Also, good for you that you've decided to actually run a scalability test. Most people don't ;-)

http://www.loadimpact.com

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