Another application (commercial) is Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner. It actually records events and plays it back on "load generator" machines. It's fairly complex, has LOTs of knobs to turn and can load test quite a bit more than just web apps, I use it to load test/benchmark Oracle 11i for instance. The software is not cheap but definitely worth looking into if you are serious about testing. (www.merc-int.com)
They also sell something called ActiveTest which may be more suited to a web applications. In this case, they will test your site for you using their hardware at a colo site. --Jauder On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Andrew Ho wrote: > Heyas, > > BH>Anyone know of good guides or general info on > BH>performance testing and emulating real use of > BH>an application. > > As a general rule, it's easiest if you have a production system already > running. Record all information that you need to reproduce the requests > (typically, HTTP request headers and POST data if applicable), from a > production server and you can replay any amount of data on a sandboxed QA > environment. You can either eliminate or proportionally shorten the time > period between requests to space out load arbitrarily. > > This is extremely effective if you have enough real user data because > you're not inventing user load. You're using real user load. > > I don't know of any product that does this all at once, but it's not hard > to hack together. If your site is entirely GET based, you can probably > just make do with parsing access logs and turning those into requests. I > believe Apache::DumpHeaders might get you most of the way on the capturing > side if you need special headers, cookies, or POST information. > > Feeding scripts into commercial products like SilkPerformer will give you > the best client side testing and reports. However, a homebrew Perl user > agent will do okay, too. Unfortunately, ab doesn't support taking in a > custom URL workload. > > For a simple record/replay load test tool that works remarkably well, > check out the resource CD that ships with Windows 2000 and you will find > the Microsoft Web Stress Tester. It's free and GUI based and can record IE > sessions and replay them with an arbitrary number of threads. It uses > Access databases to hold the tests and results so you can probably use > Perl on Windows to populate it with your custom tests. > > Humbly, > > Andrew > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > Andrew Ho http://www.tellme.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice 650-930-9062 > Tellme Networks, Inc. 1-800-555-TELL Fax 650-930-9101 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > >
