Question

I am working on a internet application which needs to be load tested before it goes to production.

How do one do the load testing? I know there are damn expensive tools out there. But how do you guys do load testing.

Thanks

Answer 1

It is a very hard question to answer since proper load testing is a very hard problem.

If you have a good lab, sure, like the previous answer, a good start is the VS load test tool.

However, if you have a couple of computers to test with, most likely, the network will get saturated with the simple reqest/reply from pages before you hit your server processing capacity.

Doing some simple load / stress testing with a computer or two is a good way encover bugs such as memory leaks if you monitor server’s performance counters. It may also tell that A particular load can be handled, but it will not tell you the maximum load. Focus on the pages most likely to be top requests and those most resource intensive. Take your best guess 🙂

How to load test your app really depends on :

1. your website architecture – how its broken down, what you can test seperatelly
2. your launch options

1 – Architecture
For example, if you are using SQL database, and especially if using it heavily, often this will be your bottle neck. Studying query plans of your calls and optimizing those somewhat is your first step.

2 – launch options
The BEST load plan, is to release the app and see what happens 🙂 that is, if you can handle this business wise. All manual load tests, even if well done, do not faithfully represent the way the users use your application, especillay for new apps, where you do not yet know how your users will use your app. Servers as good at adopting to a particular load pattern and can yield good performance for artificial usage load tests. Ideally, release the app to a small group of customers and monitor the performance. Slowly crank up the load and see how it changes. Have a good scaling plan, which goes back to the question about archicture

Sorry, wish I could answer better