Charlie, I would love to use some load testing tools, and I have gone to the mat with both the owner and my boss (the VP) to try and purchase some. But you have to keep in mind that most companies are really on tight budgets right now, and some smaller IT groups such as this one are having to make do with either free testing tools/shareware that is out on the internet, or open source tools via Sun/Jakarta. The company I am currently working with is a small manufacturer, who has a very narrow profit margin on the products he produces. He is in a niche market, but because he has such a narrow profit margin, and because the owner is close to retirement (he is 60), he is extremely reluctant to spend any money. In fact, the only reason he hired me was that some of his biggest clients told him that if he did not institute a web ordering system, they would consider taking their business to his competition. Even though the owner really dislikes computers, the threat by his larger clients caught his attention and he is now being "forced" into the "web age" kicking and screaming all the way.
Bottom line, both he and the VP say they want to take their chances on when the site would go down and under what load conditions. I've tried to convince them that when your revenue is being generated via a web site, this is NOT the way you want to find coding errors and/or other problems, but I have not been successful in that endeavor yet. They feel that most of their customers will not actually use the site, and they do not intend to advertise it's existing in order to keep the traffic down. The concept that someone might just "spam" their site for the hell of it, and cause the site to crash, doesn't concern at this time. If you do find other freebie testing tools, I would be interested in the names/links. Celeste -----Original Message----- From: charles arehart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 12:53 PM To: JRun-Talk Subject: load testing (was RE: Difficult To Reproduce Session Issue) Celeste, you say: > We haven't seen this problem, not yet anyway. But our servers > are not under > much of a load yet, as our site is just getting off the ground. We expect > that to change over the next three to four months. If we do run into the > same problem, I suspect that will be the final straw for the owner of this > facility, and he too will decide to go with another JSP/Servlet > server. I'm curious if you're considering load testing before just waiting to see what happens. Indeed, I'd like to open this discussion to a broader one of whether people do use load testing tools, especially if they do anticipate a growth in load. Or is the feeling that they're too expensive or cumbersome. Perhaps people can share their experiences with any load testing tools, indicating as well if the relative costs and challenges in using them. Perhaps they can also clarify their own load requirements: clearly someone with a commercial, clustered site with hundreds of thousands of hits per day will have different needs (and preferences) over someone with a smaller organization (or intranet) site getting hundreds of hits per day. Still, for issues like this one being discussed, just simulating many per second in a load testing tool could identify a problem that might otherwise not crop up until later. As Celeste says, better to know about it sooner than later. A testing tool seems of more value to people than they seem to give it credit. What are the facets that stop people from using them? Cost? Complexity? Lack of awareness? Choosing among many alternatives? Hopefully this thread will at least help us on the list get a better idea of what options make sense for our varying needs, and we can pass along our discoveries to others, and so on. /charlie ______________________________________________________________________ Your ad could be here. Monies from ads go to support these lists and provide more resources for the community. http://www.fusionauthority.com/ads.cfm Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
