How can I figure out the maximum load my servers can handle?

Question

In a Joel for Inc. article entitled How Difficult It Could Be: An Unconfirmed Path , he wrote:

... it turns out that Jeff and his programmers were so good that they built a site that could serve 80,000 visitors a day (approximately 755,000 page views)

How can I find out the maximum load my servers can handle?

Answer 1

Jason, have you looked at the load test built into the Visual Studio 2008 Team System? Watch this video to see a demo.

Edit: here is another video that has the best resolution.

Answer 2

Benchmarking your software is often much more complicated than it sounds. Sure, it’s easy to get some numbers that say something about the performance of your software, but if it wasn’t calculated using a very accurate representation of the actual patterns of use by your end users, it may be completely different from the actual results you get in the wild. . Websites are generally difficult to compare. Of course, you can run a script that measures the time it takes to create the page, but it will be a completely different number from what you see when used in the real world.

To create a solid benchmark for what your servers can handle, you first need to figure out what your users' usage patterns are. If your site is already running, you can easily collect this data from your logs. Then you need to create a simulation that will emulate the same templates as your real users ... this is to view the start page, log in, view the status page, etc. Different pages will create a different load on the servers, requiring the actual selection of the correct set of pages when simulating loading on your servers. Finally, you need to find out what resources are cached by your users, you can do this again by looking at your access log or using a tool like firebug.

Answer 3

JMeter, ab or httperf

Answer 4

You can create several “stress tests” and run them, as other posters say.

Apache has a JMeter tool in which you can create these tests and run them several times.

http://jmeter.apache.org/

Hey.

Answer 5

Apache has a tool called ab that can be used to test the server. It can simulate load requests and concurrency for you.

Answer 6

Basically, you need to imitate user behavior and constantly increase the number of users simulating until the server response is no longer acceptable.

There are many tools that can do this, but essentially you want to record multiple sessions on your site and then play those sessions back (adding some randomizations to reflect real user behavior) many times.

You will need to record the performance of each session and continue to increase the load until the performance becomes unacceptable.