How to set up a load/stress test for a web site? [closed]

Answer 1

Generally speaking load tests will run through common scenarios with various user loads.

So for example, you might set up a test wherein 50 users login every second for 10 minutes and another where the number starts at 5 users/second and scales up to 1000 / second or whatever numbers make sense for your your site.

edit:
The idea is to test how your actual application behaves when in use across all tiers.
If you are going to be load testing, definitely invest (time and or $) in a good tool.

Answer 2

First, get a web-stressing tool like Neoload.

Model a number of user activities and bias your test to correspond to predicted user patterns, then scale load up as you see fit. Running queries against the database and measuring response time tells you nothing about user experience. Rather, by modeling user activities, you can gauge exactly how your server/system will respond under real load, as that's what you'll be generating.

User activity modeling can get pretty complex, but good stress tools like Neoload let you closely model the exact behavior of any machine hitting your server. Ideally, you would craft network traffic just as you would normally, so make sure to hit your load balancer if you've got one.

Answer 3

As you can see by the answers to this question, there are lots of programs available for load testing. In my experience I have found Siege to be my personal favorite. Its simple, provides most of the options needed to do load testing. Here is an example usage:

seige -c 10 -t 1M http://www.google.com

This will send 10 concurrent requests to google.com for 1 minute. If you want to test more than one page you can also provide a file which contains a list of urls.

Note that a tool like seige is appropriate when you have a single or set of urls that you would like to test. If you want to test more complicated flows (e.g. user logs in, submits entry, logs out) then you will want to use something like selenium.

Answer 4

Here's a listing of tools that will help get you started with this. You're right to want to read up on it first, stress testing can get complicated.

http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html

Answer 5

Check out JMeter. I found it a little tricky to get started with but once you have your tests setup it's easy to run. They have a tutorial on how to setup distributed testing here.

Answer 6

I found Visual Studio Test edition easier to test with (though it is not free). You can record a browsing session as a single test and it will allow you to read the perfmon stats from both your webserver and database easily enough.

The first step you should take is to look at your IIS logs to find out what is going on there. Log Parser 2 is the tool I would use should get the IIS logs into a database.

Querying that will give you an idea of peak load.

Next step is to formulate a goal or two for the testing. Do you need to make sure the website is able to handle spike loads on a single page or two of X requests per second?

Are you intending on increasing the customers of the site, in which case take the current IIS log load and forumlate webtests that can simulate that range of page requests, but load for the expected concurrent users.

If you are intending to change functionality on the site, you can do a baseline loadtest and compare the performance after any changes to the site.

The real goal in load testing is to prove that the application and hardware are able to handle a target load that the business finds acceptable and still returns pages within a reasonable time.