Topic: Benchmarking/testing

[shnazz]

I am not very experienced with testing out a system before a major release and am wondering what other people do out there with a wamp or similar environment.

I am considering using the apache benchmarker on some of my larger php scripts and relating some hardware resource stats on a before and after basis. What suggestions/tips can you guys give me?

Any help is appreciated.

- Shnazz

[tdonovan]

Although it's getting a bit old now, the free Microsoft-supplied WAST tool is still very useful for testing Windows Web Apps.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/itsolutions/intranet/downloads/webstres.mspx

It provides a better test for applications than ab.exe because it can record a long series of page requests, including cookies and POST data, rather than just hitting one page repeatedly.

Here are the classic beginners' mistakes:

Don't run your load-test tool (WAST) on the same machine as the server you are testing if you can avoid it.

Be sure to make some entry errors in your testing script. Don't just record perfect sessions.

It is more useful to run a large number of concurrent (simulated) users with random pauses than a smaller number of users without pauses. Long test runs (i.e. overnight, over the weekend) with a realistic user load and random pauses is more likely to uncover subtle programming errors than simple "saturation" load tests.

If your server has a robots.txt file, remove it before running WAST and restore it afterwards. WAST will not test a server which has a robots.txt file.

For things which are hard to script, like adding new records to a database, you might want to test manually while your load-test script is running.

I hope this helps,
-tom-

[shnazz]

Thanks Tom.

I will be using this software and taking your advice when the time comes. If anything interesting comes up, I'll be sure to post.


- shnazz