Performing a Stress Test on Web Application?

Question

In the past, I used Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool and Pylot to stress test web applications. I'd written a simple home page, login script, and site walkthrough (in an ecommerce site adding a few items to a cart and checkout).

Just hitting the homepage hard with a handful of developers would almost always locate a major problem. More scalability problems would surface at the second stage, and even more - after the launch.

The URL of the tools I used were Microsoft Homer (aka Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool) and Pylot.

The reports generated by these tools never made much sense to me, and I would spend many hours trying to figure out what kind of concurrent load the site would be able to support. It was always worth it because the stupidest bugs and bottlenecks would always come up (for instance, web server misconfigurations).

What have you done, what tools have you used, and what success have you had with your approach? The part that is most interesting to me is coming up with some kind of a meaningful formula for calculating the number of concurrent users an app can support from the numbers reported by the stress test application.

Answer 1

You asked this question almost a year ago and I don't know if you still are looking for another way of benchmarking your website. However since this question is still not marked as solved I would like to suggest the free webservice LoadImpact (btw. not affiliated). Just got this link via twitter and would like to share this find. They create a reasonable good overview and for a few bucks more you get the "full impact mode". This probably sounds strange, but good luck pushing and braking your service :)

Answer 2

ab, siege, tsung, httperf, Trample, Pylot, request-log-analyzer, perftools

Answer 3

I found IBM Page Detailer also an interesting tool to work with.

Answer 4

I've used openSTA.

This allows a session with a web site to be recorded and then played back via a relatively simple script language.

You can easily test web services and write your own scripts.

It allows you to put scripts together in a test in any way you want and configure the number of iterations, the number of users in each iteration, the ramp up time to introduce each new user and the delay between each iteration. Tests can also be scheduled in the future.

It's open source and free.

It produces a number of reports which can be saved to a spreadsheet. We then use a pivot table to easily analyse and graph the results.

Answer 5

This is an old question, but I think newer solutions are worthy of a mention. Checkout LoadImpact: http://www.loadimpact.com.

Answer 6

I tried WebLoad it's a pretty neat tool. It comes with and test script IDE which allows you to record user action on a website. It also draws a graph as it perform stress test on your web server. Try it out, I highly recommend it.