

Ask HN: Proper Way of Load Testing and Good Tools? - reader_1000

Hi,<p>Which load testing tools do you suggest for web application performance and capacity measuring. What is the best practices or proper way of doing load testing? Could you please share your experience? Thanks.
======
blubberlubber
There are some very good, very expensive machines for this.

Open-source wise, there's Tsung: [http://tsung.erlang-
projects.org/](http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/)

------
grumps
FWIW I'm not sure if it's good practice or not. I used locust.io recently. The
client allowed me to ramp up request rates until I got HTTP Errors. I measured
against their previous analytic sites. Of course this was a guesstimate
because GA doesn't let you see the max num of simultaneous users. I found
holes in the infrastructure that need to be remedied. The holes were to
prevent anything similar to a slashdot effect. I also watched against the
servers IO/CPU utlization, and RAM.

------
whichdan
You can get a lot of mileage out of Apache Bench[1].

[1]
[http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html)

~~~
reader_1000
Thanks for suggestion. How do you plan test case scenarios and how do you
interpret them? There was an article stating that developers just use powers
of 10 when doing performance tests but that does not necessarily give correct
results.

~~~
whichdan
For a naive test, powers of ten work alright. Generally I increase the number
requests until it tops out. Lets say your app takes 200ms and you can handle
1000 reqs/sec, you can use that as a baseline to determine whether you need to
throw more hardware at it or work on improving the software.

------
blubberlubber
Also, good for you that you've decided to actually run a scalability test.
Most people don't ;-)

------
smartwater
[http://www.loadimpact.com](http://www.loadimpact.com)

