[thelist] load testing tools and concurrency

[Peter Loron]

On May 15, 2008, at 1:06 PM, John DeStefano wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've been asked to look into why a particular web application is
> responding very slowly, and come up with a sound method for testing
> the server.  I tried hammering it with Apache's AB, which seems like a
> nice tool, but it returned inconsistent results, and I've read
> multiple reports of this being a problem.  cURL is another option.
> But I'm wondering whether there already exists some testing "suite"
> that would ease the entire process, by:
> - generating a "real-world" load with each request, returning the
> entire contents of a page
> - allowing both sequential and concurrent requests
> - getting cached or non-cached results (by including a no-cache header
> with the request)
> - record the results (avg,min,max,timeouts)
> - graphing would be nice ;)
> - and of course, it would have to be open-source, and Mac and/or  
> Linux-
> based
>
> Now that I'm finished dreaming, I'd appreciate your suggestions on
> something that covers any or all of these bases.
>
>
> Now, as sidebar: this particular application (which was built using
> MySQL + Python + Apache) seems slow with sequential reads, but even
> worse when concurrent requests are used.  I'm being told that this
> isn't possible, since the server should be able to queue requests as
> they come in, sequential or otherwise.  While that seems evident,
> sequential reads return results, while concurrent reads (in any
> quantity: 10, 5, even 2) result in time-outs much more often.  Any
> thoughts on this?
>
>
> Thanks,
> ~John

Check out JMeter.

-Pete