[thelist] Stress Testing?

Casey Crookston CaseyCrookston at savvysherpa.com
Wed Jul 14 16:21:36 CDT 2010


Hi,

I've been asked by my boss to stress test a new web app they plan to launch soon - they want to know how many users it will handle before performance starts to degrade.  Never done this before, and hoping someone can give me some pointers.

As the app is not yet available outside our network, the testing must be done from an internal machine (or machines). So no external cloud options will work.

I did find that Microsoft has a free tool called Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT), but in reading over their 59 page how-to-use document, I'm feeling very lost and frustrated, mostly around creating the Scenario File.  The app is a document management tool in which clients will be uploading documents, and there is a very specific set of UI steps that need to be tested.  From what I can tell, WCAT won't support outlining these steps.

I'm familiar with Selenium which allows you to record as set of UI steps and then play it back later.  I found a test suite (www.pushtotest.com) that lets you use a Selenium script as the base for stress testing, but at most it only tests for 200 simultaneous users.  I think we'll need to be testing around 1,000.

Have any of you ever done something like this before?

Thanks,

Casey Crookston

763-566-1700 x126



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