Web server benchmarking - simulating real traffic

[ondra_knezour]

Hello all,

any of you can imagine real traffic on server doing virtual hosting. All those clients requests, static page browsing, many of Drupals, Worpresses etc. installed in vhosts accounts, really slooooow PHP scripts written by script kidies, database usage and so on.

Question is - how to simulate such traffic in lab for testing performace/server tunning? Have anybody an idea how to do that except writting dozens different test webs by hand and then configure some benchmark to crawle through such pages URL by URL?

Even any theoretical thoughts and academical papers are welcome

 

[Christopher]

I use benchmarks/siege all the time on my development web servers to keep the software folks in check. Siege will hammer away at a set of URLs you give it at the given rate, delays and concurrency. The only (minor) drawback is it won't parse the HTML and download associated objects in the HTML. Generally that isn't a problem since sending static content is trivial, its the dynamically generated HTML that one worries about for performance.

If your looking for a much more real-world test than what siege can give you, I'd look at Gomez. They are nice for comprehensive load testing, but are quite expensive for their services.

 

[kenorb]

Try JMeter, it's the best for simulate traffic for testing:

> portsearch -n jmeter
Port:	jakarta-jmeter-2.4
Path:	/usr/ports/www/jakarta-jmeter
Info:	Functional behaviour load and performance test application
WWW:	[url]http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/[/url]

For writing the tests, try:

Port:	selenium-0.6.1
Path:	/usr/ports/www/selenium
Info:	Selenium is web application test tool!
Maint:	[email]kaworu@users.sourceforge.jp[/email]
B-deps:	
R-deps:	
WWW:	[url]http://selenium.thoughtworks.com/[/url]

There are also plugins Selenium IDE (for Firefox, etc.) for simple macros and tests.

Also:
man ab