Nov 8th, 2007
Web 2.0 Stress Testing
A question popped up on linkedin.com about Web 2.0 app stress testing. For those of you wondering how a lot of people do it, here’s the question and my response:
“In the enterprise software industry I am familiar with tools such as SQA team test etc-from a Project Management perspective. Does anyone have any links to site with good strategy information and / or licensable tools that would be analogous to this and allow automated testing against a LAMP based web application to simulate a high traffic / high transaction load prior to launch?”
My response:
“The most common way is through using small groups of humans to do the testing and expanding that group. Different testing methods are done based on what type of application it is. If it’s an app that is read heavy, then using simple tools like apachebench may give you good results but if there is a lot of interactivity and writing to the database, this is a little harder.
Based on very basic testing you should be able to use tools to analyze server and storage performance and then extrapolate some estimates from those results on how much load a certain number of users puts on your application.
In a nutshell, web 2.0 apps have drastically different performance requirements depending on what type of app it is. Digg.com vs. something like Formspring.com put two completely different loads on systems and performance problems would be solved differently (e.g. page caching vs. disk caching).
If you want more specific info, let me know.”