Re: [Hampshire] LAMP performance

Hiya Jacqui,

On Wednesday 17 February 2010 15:53:23 Jacqui Caren-home wrote:
> Just been asked by a client to measure his customers system peformance
> limits by "load testing" his server. They customer wants "real world"
> measurements and the budget is nigh on zero. So I suggested using the log
> files to build a site profile and then use some tool to hit the server with
> requests of a similar composition to the profile gleaned from the logs.
>
> Not perfect by any means but I could not find anything that would mimic
> real user behaviour, provide reporting and would scale to say 600
> concurrent "users" without hammering the box used to do the testing.
>
> The only tool I am familiar with is apache 'ab' or a bunch of perl based
> systems that are too resource intensive for this job.
> The problem with ab is that it only takes one URL at a time and from the
> source code it is not possible to modify it to handle more than one URL at
> once.
>
> So any suggestions for a tool that could be given data about a set of URL
> (requests) and hit counts and using a set cuncurreny limit process the URLS
> and provide raw results I could examine?
>
> My current plan of setting off a number of concurrent 'ab's (one per URL)
> is not ideal.
>
> Jacqui

I have used JMeter (Java) before and also OpenSTA (although opensource it only
runs on Windows). Both allow you to capture a session and replay it.

You also need to clarify with your customer what 600 concurrent users means...
Some people assume 600 people all hitting submit at the same time others see
it as 600 users accessing the app over a period of an hour (insert whatever
time period) which might only result in 10 submits a minute.

Jmeter has the advantage that you can farm out the load to a number of servers
and aggregate the results. Not sure whether OpenSTA can do that.

HTH,
Steve