Stress Testing a website?

[davetherave2]

Hi All,

Just wondering if anyone can recommend some good stress/load testing software.solutions for asp.net websites?

After recent experiences with a website that worked all through development testing and User testing when the site when live the system started to timeout, so in order to prevent this in future I would like to stress test it and make the appropriate changes/improvements before something else like this happens again.

Thanks in advance

 

[DanF]

In the past we've put our site up on the same platform as our live site and had an external company properly stress test it, this was a few years ago. If you host with say AWS or Azure this will make it really easy to do, there's also some online stress testing sites out there where you pay for load tests with credits. I've only just looked in to these so no idea which are really good.

you could take a look at these guys, they have a free test you can run to see how it works

http://loadimpact.com/

Oh it's always best to test on servers which are as close to you're live infrastructure as possible, your bottlenecks and results will be different to say running on a local pc.

 

[ilcp]

you could use firefox extension called imacro, create a macro on your site (i,e. fill in a form) and then re-run it 1000 times recording time taken each run?

 

[DanF]

It's pretty much impossible to properly stress test a well made website on live servers from a single machine, you really need some kind of distributed testing farm to do it.

It's possible to do on things like AWS where I guess if you have made your user acceptance testing in say selenium then you could spin up cheap AWS instances in a grid to run against your site. If you can get this working in an automated way it can be used for every big release you do.

 

[AJK]

JMeter is a useful little tool, needs a bit of setup work to build a test plan, and a bit more to make it work with ViewState, but it'll help to highlight any obvious bottleneck areas.

 

[davetherave2]

Thanks for the answers I will take a look into them and see if any really fit what we need. Testing at this level is something I have always wanted to do but just haven't had the need/ time to do properly.

I just need to add it onto the list of things I am currently learning/reviewing. (Trying to bring my dev skills a bit more up to date given our dev team at work is now very much MVC focused so I feel a lot out of touch as the old webforms/winforms developer. Although have been picking up MVC here and there while working on some demo projects)

 

[Dreadhead]

http://www.blitz.io/

This site is pretty good.

 

[grudas]

we use gatling tool at work, i set up a seperate VM for it and stress test random parts of our client site loads better than jmeter which they were using before i joined.