Load test for 1000 concurrent users

Question

We plan to use the Visual Studio 2010 download test to conduct a stress test for our application. We like to find out if our MVC3 application can handle 1000 concurrent users or not.

How many physical machines do we need for this?

The current plan that we have in mind is given below.

• Server 1 (web server + MS SQL): this server is designed to host our application.
• Server 2 (Control Controller + its database)
• Machine 1 (test agent 1 for 200 concurrent users) * 5

So it looks like we need 7 physical machines. Are we overrated about physical machines? Any idea for testing the load of 1000 concurrent users will be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

In accordance with my experience in load testing through Visual Studio 2010 I suggest:

• In server2 you can also add one Test Agent . The controller is not a difficult process. His job is simply to exchange tests among agents and control them.
  It also collects Data and Diagnostics , however I suggest following this MSDN message and not using them.
• I think that 5 agents for 1000 users are too many. I can run about 700-800 users per agent. Of course, this depends on the hardware and Unit Tests/ Web Performance Tests that you use in your download tests.
• If this is not a scenario of your production deployment for your project, I would suggest on server1 to separate Web Server from your Db , because load testing will require more CPU and Memory .