Website/Web-App Load Testing

visibleman · 14 Feb 2012 at 13:03

Hi all,
I'm certain someone posted something similar a few weeks but can't find anything; but can anyone recommend any tools/companies that'll load/stress test a web application (PHP based)/current server config?
Ideally just after something that'll replicate the number of, estimated, hits (remember seeing a few online tools that'll do this but can't for the life of me remember the sites) come launch day to make sure it won't instantly fall over but testing of certain features of the application would be useful as well.

Much appreciated for any help!

Pho · 14 Feb 2012 at 13:14

I was looking into this the other day too. Since we use ASP.NET / IIS WCAT seems to be recommended (a complete pain to setup though). For Apache, PHP etc I came across Apache jMeter.

visibleman · 14 Feb 2012 at 17:05

Cheers Pho. Did just see jMeter mentioned in another thread about stress testing Apache, so i'll give it ago.

Does anyone know of companies or tools that'll do specific stress testing of certain functions/features of a web-app? Ideally I'd like to load test DB side of the app, specifically where users will be entering/editing a lot of data.

Pho · 14 Feb 2012 at 17:50

Well with WCAT and I assume jMeter you can give it a work load to process and a number of virtual clients to simulate that work load- e.g. you can have 200 virtual users doing something at once.

There's a plugin for Fiddler to capture a session and then execute it as a WCAT load with all your adding/editing/deleting/report loading/whatever you want to do.

visibleman · 14 Feb 2012 at 20:03

That sounds spot on, will have a look at WCAT and Fiddler (which i've used in the past for debugging).
From my hunt today, Pylot, The Grinder and Selenium (read that it's 'industry standard') are also worth looking at apparently.

Maccy · 14 Feb 2012 at 20:17

Company I work for does this, but it's a very costly service. These free tools are all very well, but to accurately simulate load you need to have pretty hefty injectors and load generators and these aren't cheap.
How many users were you wanting to simulate?

visibleman · 14 Feb 2012 at 23:00

Yup, the more I read the more it is becoming apparent that it isn't something we're going to be able tackle ourselves, certainly not at any reasonable scale. Although I was recommended BrowserMob on another forum, which is apparently hosted Selenium but I’ve have yet to fully read up on it.

Maccy - To be honest, we're not quite sure how many users to simulate (current estimates run from a few hundred concurrent users to low ten thousands) and that's one of the issues that is currently being discussed. Ideally we're more interested in knowing what will 'break' the website/web-app (think monster/reed/linkedIn type-affair) in its current state and being able to highlight any issues/problematic areas.

Maccy · 15 Feb 2012 at 19:03

Well if you're seriously interested, we can emulate up to 10,000 concurrent users (I think, could be more) but we can do an initial smoke test, a ramped up stress test and then a few spike tests.
Drop me an email in Trust if you want more info and I can put you in touch with someone who can provide more info