I am working on a internet application which needs to be load tested before it goes to production.
How do one do the load testing? I know there are damn expensive tools out there. But how do you guys do load testing.
Thanks
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There are some good enterprise solutions, are you plan to invest some money or looking for a free solution?sll– sll2011-10-29 19:52:44 +00:00Commented Oct 29, 2011 at 19:52
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3 Answers
It is a very hard question to answer since proper load testing is a very hard problem.
If you have a good lab, sure, like the previous answer, a good start is the VS load test tool.
However, if you have a couple of computers to test with, most likely, the network will get saturated with the simple reqest/reply from pages before you hit your server processing capacity.
Doing some simple load / stress testing with a computer or two is a good way encover bugs such as memory leaks if you monitor server's performance counters. It may also tell that A particular load can be handled, but it will not tell you the maximum load. Focus on the pages most likely to be top requests and those most resource intensive. Take your best guess :)
How to load test your app really depends on :
- your website architecture - how its broken down, what you can test seperatelly
- your launch options
1 - Architecture For example, if you are using SQL database, and especially if using it heavily, often this will be your bottle neck. Studying query plans of your calls and optimizing those somewhat is your first step.
2 - launch options The BEST load plan, is to release the app and see what happens :) that is, if you can handle this business wise. All manual load tests, even if well done, do not faithfully represent the way the users use your application, especillay for new apps, where you do not yet know how your users will use your app. Servers as good at adopting to a particular load pattern and can yield good performance for artificial usage load tests. Ideally, release the app to a small group of customers and monitor the performance. Slowly crank up the load and see how it changes. Have a good scaling plan, which goes back to the question about archicture
Sorry, wish I could answer better
Comments
Not all commercial solutions are expensive. Our tool (Web Performance Load Tester) is on the lower end of the price range. The free / open source tools are severely lacking, IMO, but if you have enough time to invest, they can get the job done.
For beginners, the key things are:
- choose appropriate tools for the job
- start early and test often
- don't get bogged trying to design the perfect test - ANY load test is merely a rough approximation of real-world traffic
- measure what is important to you - for most sites this will be page load time and error rate
