What load testing solutions do you use?

[Daniel Pitts]

I've been looking for load testing solutions, and there are quite a few
choices, many are expensive, some seem less than useful. So I'll ask here.

What have you used in the past for load testing?

I'm specifically testing Java servlets, which request data from either
HTTP XML resources, or databases (primarily MySQL). The difficulty I
have is that setting up an entire environment for our system is not a
trivial task (large amounts of data, and very complex system). I have
three kinds of load testing I'd like to perform.
1. Failure mode testing. What happens when the downstream
datasources start to fail under load, what can be done to make that more
graceful.
2. Capacity and scalability planing.
3. Performance tuning for individual requests.

2 and 3 we can glean /some/ useful information from our production
environment, but we don't want to test failures or cause failures in
production, obviously.

Thanks,
Daniel.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I've been looking for load testing solutions, and there are quite a few
choices, many are expensive, some seem less than useful. So I'll ask here.

What have you used in the past for load testing?

I'm specifically testing Java servlets, which request data from either
HTTP XML resources, or databases (primarily MySQL). The difficulty I
have is that setting up an entire environment for our system is not a
trivial task (large amounts of data, and very complex system). I have
three kinds of load testing I'd like to perform.
1. Failure mode testing. What happens when the downstream datasources
start to fail under load, what can be done to make that more graceful.
2. Capacity and scalability planing.
3. Performance tuning for individual requests.

2 and 3 we can glean /some/ useful information from our production
environment, but we don't want to test failures or cause failures in
production, obviously.

Obviously you need something to call the servlets.

There are commercial offerings like LoadRunner,
open source Apache JMeter, you can build something
yourself on top of Junit or Cactus, you can build
something yourself from scratch.

To be able to test #1 you need to be able to mock
the backend with something you can control responsiveness
for.

Arne

 

[Daniel Pitts]

Obviously you need something to call the servlets.

There are commercial offerings like LoadRunner,
open source Apache JMeter, you can build something
yourself on top of Junit or Cactus, you can build
something yourself from scratch.

There is also apachebench for simple cases.

To be able to test #1 you need to be able to mock
the backend with something you can control responsiveness
for.

Yup, I've seen commercial products that do this (ParaSoft Virtualize is
one such thing). Though the license model doesn't really suit
small-scale load-testing.

We started working on our own home-grown solution, but if there are
other solutions to that problem, I'd love to know about them. We're
most interested in HTTP backend simulation, we don't need to worry so
much about the DB stuff, at least not for my team.

Thanks for the reply,
Daniel.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

There is also apachebench for simple cases.
Yup, I've seen commercial products that do this (ParaSoft Virtualize is
one such thing). Though the license model doesn't really suit
small-scale load-testing.

We started working on our own home-grown solution, but if there are
other solutions to that problem, I'd love to know about them. We're most
interested in HTTP backend simulation, we don't need to worry so much
about the DB stuff, at least not for my team.

I would write the mock stuff myself. I would expect the specific
requirements to be so special that I doubt there will be a good
COTS solution.

Arne

 

[Daniel Pitts]

I would write the mock stuff myself. I would expect the specific
requirements to be so special that I doubt there will be a good
COTS solution.

Again, ParaSoft Virtualize appears to be very good. It supported many
different protocols (HTTP, various DBs, etc...) but just too expensive
for what we needed. The type of product exists, but I've only found one
example of it, and we don't want to pay that much for it.

 

[Scott Price]

An inexpensive cloud load testing tool is LoadStorm. You don't
quantify the load you think you will need, but LoadStorm can deliver
up to 100,000 concurrent users or 15,000 requests per second. It
isn't a fit for many situations, and there is only one way to know if
it will work for your web application - try it. The tool is SaaS, so
it is offered as a free account forever with a limit of 25 concurrent
users. There is no limit to the number of tests you can run. If it
works for your requirements, then you can upgrade with a credit card
and pay per test. 1,000 concurrent users is $39.90. http://loadstorm.com