Tools for Stress Testing Websites?

rickindy asks: "What do you usedfor web site load testing tools? Open source or commercial is fine, but my employer it hosting a boatload of sites, and we would like to find the breaking point for the server at some time other than 3:00am."

The best way to stresstest a website...

[fod]

... is to place a link to the page on the Slashdot frontpage. It's opensource too!

Posting it on Slashdot ? :)

[mbyte]

Well ... thanks to the famous /. effect ;)

mabye Cmdr Taco can make a slashbox for it :)

Re:Posting it on Slashdot ? :)

[matt_wilts]

Joking aside, how about Slashdot offering this as a public service? "Distributed Web Stress Testing". Put a button on the front page, saying "Click here to stress test this week/day's site". Charge the companies that ask you to stress test, send the proceeds to the EFF or similar.

Matt

Re:Posting it on Slashdot ? :)

[matt_wilts]

I dunno...there might be people out there who actually WANT to be Slashdotted. Granted, I can't think of any off hand, but you never know.

Maybe this will help?

[hhe_hee]

I think this [softwareqatest.com] link can be helpful for you, it provides a huge list of web test tools. They are organized in categories for which sort of test one would like to perform. They also have a FAQ [softwareqatest.com] which answers several questions about how sites can be tested, and it also points out what things you should think about, like; what are the expected loads, who is the target audience, what kind of performance is expected on the client side, and so on.

Mercury Interactive

[penguinboy]

This place [mercuryinteractive.com]claims to do that sort of thing, though I've never used it myself.

Re:Mercury Interactive

[Anonymous Coward]

Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner tool works in this space (among others), and does a pretty good job of it. One point: you really want to get someone trained with the product; there's a lot of companies that have bought it and left it on the shelf because it's not exactly simple to use. It's not cheap either; licence costs are per "virtual user" and get pretty steep pretty fast unless you can negotiate some sort of discount with Mercury directly.

And as a Mercury Certified Product Specialist, allow me to introduce myself...

All jokes aside: It is a good tool, I'm not employed by Mercury Interactive, and I am trained/certified with it (along with a bunch of other people) so it pays my bills to some extent. Take my advice with this in mind

Re:Mercury Interactive

[walker8201]

I also use Loadrunner, but I am not a Mercury Certified / Trained individual. I've used it for about a year, and I've also got WebLoad from Radview (cheaper, does a lot of the same stuff). Of the two I definitely prefer Loadrunner. It seems that Mercury's product is more polished and has better tech support backing it up. If money was not an issue I would choose Loadrunner, but yes, the virtual users for it are pricey.

Re:Mercury Interactive

[smaughster]

Mercury has some nice tools. The main thing which seperates them and other commercial products from the "free" or do-it-yourself tools, is that they have automated the recording and analysing features and wrapped it in an easy to use GUI. This makes it easy to reuse scripts and compare data. I work at the it department of a large corporation, and we have a dedicated team for load testing, and having been using mercury for several years now. There are also other nice commercial products, like Compuware's ecotools. What is best for you depends on what you want to do with it, how often, how many virtual users, and what you want to measure during the test (i.e. can you also correlate the memory or CPU usage during test with your test date automatically).

http_load

[elbuddha]

http://www.acme.com/software/http_load/ [acme.com]

WAST

[Merkins]

This will probably get me strung up.... but Microsoft have a free one called the "Web Application Stress Tool".

Might be worth a look if you have an MS Box to run it on.

Re:WAST

[Anonymous Coward]

I am head of Performance Testing at a very large retail site. While free, WAST, aka Homer sux.
Make sure and look for tools that can records scripts against port 443.

Jakarta JMeter

[Gill Bates]

There's the Jakarta project's JMeter [apache.org], from the folks at Apache. It's written in Java, but can be used to load test a wide variety of network resources.

Try ApacheBench.pm

[rajumd]

This is a module available at CPAN that you can use to simulate various kinds of loads. Just load up one or more lists of URLs, tell it how many iterations you want to run, and how many concurrent users you want to test with and collect your figures.

I've used it recently to run a bunch of stress tests against some dual PIII 1GHz boxes w/2GB RAM running RedHat 7.1 & Apache and found they outperformed a fully loaded IBM RS/6000 H50 running Netscape Enterprise at least twice over!

One think you need to watch out for is that if you are using name-based virtual hosting the module has a bug and won't work. You can ask Adi Fairbank, the author, for the bugfix which he hasn't released for some reason.

Re:Try ApacheBench.pm

[dsb3]

But surely your agreeing to the Netscape Enterprise license explicitly forbade you from posting this benchmark.

I hope Netscape didn't read your post!

Apache ships with one.

[Zurk]

its called ab for apache bench or something similar. its found in most distros already installed and its fairly good at load testing. just see man ab if you have apache installed or look on apache.org for ab. its shipped as a part of apache anyway.

Capacity Calibration

[Anonymous Coward]

Capacity Calibration (www.capcal.com) does real life load testing of websites using a distributed.net type of thing with agent software running on hundreds of thousands of machines across the Internet. They aren't free, but they are real life.

one (commercial) solution

[mlc]

I used to work for empirix [empirix.com] on a product which I think is still called e-Test Suite. One of the components, e-Load, does precisely what you describe, and there are some other nifty tools in there too.

Siege

[pete-classic]

I'm a bit biased, but . . .

Siege [joedog.org] is a great way to stress test a webserver.

GPL, C (with an optional bash wrapper for automated "progressive" testing)

I want to "port" the script to straight sh, but I can't find it for testing. If anyone knows where I can get it, let me know.

-Peter

How in depth is your testing?

[ader]

If you just want to download a predefined set of URLs, then Siege or any similar tool will do fine (heck, you could even hack something up in shell using wget or curl). However, if you want to process what you fetch and perhaps use the results to construct new URLs based on the contents (e.g. grabbing session IDs or other identifiers for use in subsequent GET or POST operations), the choice is more limited since very few "stress testers" are that intelligent or flexible. The E-Test suite by Empirix certainly allows that kind of manipulation if you have time to script it properly (for example, it is one of the few tools with built-in support for handling BroadVision sessions), but it is proprietary and (from what I've seen) mainly Windows-based.
There is also a free tool called Load (see Freshmeat, v2.0 just released), which is Java/XML/SOAP-based. It apparently allows you to script Java objects via XML. Haven't tried it, but it's worth a look.

Ade_
/

do you want a full-service or self-service one

[DFossmeister]

Keynote [keynote.com] offers a couple of solutions that will push your site to any limit you want. Their Test Perspective load test tool is a self-service online tool that generates the load for you, and their KeyReadiness Load Testing service is a completely outsourced option.

Their options are services only, so the tools are proprietary. The KeyReadiness tool is really cool though because it runs on a large Linux farm.

Disclaimer: I am affliated with Keynote, but that doesn't mean that the service doesn't kick ass...

Donald E. Foss