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Tools for Stress Testing Websites?

Posted by Cliff on from the breaking-things-in-a-controlled-environment dept.

rickindy asks: "What do you usedfor web site load testing tools? Open source or commercial is fine, but my employer it hosting a boatload of sites, and we would like to find the breaking point for the server at some time other than 3:00am."

12 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. The best way to stresstest a website... by fod · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... is to place a link to the page on the Slashdot frontpage. It's opensource too!

  2. Posting it on Slashdot ? :) by mbyte · · Score: 2

    Well ... thanks to the famous /. effect ;)

    mabye Cmdr Taco can make a slashbox for it :)

  3. Maybe this will help? by hhe_hee · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think this link can be helpful for you, it provides a huge list of web test tools. They are organized in categories for which sort of test one would like to perform. They also have a FAQ which answers several questions about how sites can be tested, and it also points out what things you should think about, like; what are the expected loads, who is the target audience, what kind of performance is expected on the client side, and so on.

    --
    2 reptiles beneath your current threshold.
  4. Mercury Interactive by penguinboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This placeclaims to do that sort of thing, though I've never used it myself.

    1. Re:Mercury Interactive by smaughster · · Score: 2

      Mercury has some nice tools. The main thing which seperates them and other commercial products from the "free" or do-it-yourself tools, is that they have automated the recording and analysing features and wrapped it in an easy to use GUI. This makes it easy to reuse scripts and compare data. I work at the it department of a large corporation, and we have a dedicated team for load testing, and having been using mercury for several years now. There are also other nice commercial products, like Compuware's ecotools. What is best for you depends on what you want to do with it, how often, how many virtual users, and what you want to measure during the test (i.e. can you also correlate the memory or CPU usage during test with your test date automatically).

      --
      I intend to live forever, so far so good.
  5. http_load by elbuddha · · Score: 3, Informative



    http://www.acme.com/software/http_load/

  6. WAST by Merkins · · Score: 2, Informative

    This will probably get me strung up.... but Microsoft have a free one called the "Web Application Stress Tool".

    Might be worth a look if you have an MS Box to run it on.

    --

    Learn to Improvise
  7. Jakarta JMeter by Gill+Bates · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's the Jakarta project's JMeter, from the folks at Apache. It's written in Java, but can be used to load test a wide variety of network resources.

  8. Try ApacheBench.pm by rajumd · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This is a module available at CPAN that you can use to simulate various kinds of loads. Just load up one or more lists of URLs, tell it how many iterations you want to run, and how many concurrent users you want to test with and collect your figures.

    I've used it recently to run a bunch of stress tests against some dual PIII 1GHz boxes w/2GB RAM running RedHat 7.1 & Apache and found they outperformed a fully loaded IBM RS/6000 H50 running Netscape Enterprise at least twice over!

    One think you need to watch out for is that if you are using name-based virtual hosting the module has a bug and won't work. You can ask Adi Fairbank, the author, for the bugfix which he hasn't released for some reason.

  9. Apache ships with one. by Zurk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    its called ab for apache bench or something similar. its found in most distros already installed and its fairly good at load testing. just see man ab if you have apache installed or look on apache.org for ab. its shipped as a part of apache anyway.

  10. one (commercial) solution by mlc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I used to work for empirix on a product which I think is still called e-Test Suite. One of the components, e-Load, does precisely what you describe, and there are some other nifty tools in there too.

  11. Siege by pete-classic · · Score: 2

    I'm a bit biased, but . . .

    Siege is a great way to stress test a webserver.

    GPL, C (with an optional bash wrapper for automated "progressive" testing)

    I want to "port" the script to straight sh, but I can't find it for testing. If anyone knows where I can get it, let me know.

    -Peter