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Recommended load testing tools?
I'm looking for a decent free/low-cost load testing tool that I can run from my LEBs to verify the performance of a production site. All I really need to be able to do is simulate a number of concurrent users navigating through a number of pre-set paths, with a little bit of randomness thrown in for good measure.
Never really been involved in anything like this, and Googling brings up a lot of options, so I'm not really sure where to start. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Comments
http://loadimpact.com is a good start.
I would suggest : http://www.blitz.io/
jmeter
+1 for blitz.io
blitz.io was nice until the removed the free <250 concurrency plan
I went back to using siege benchmark http://www.joedog.org/siege-home/ which is integrated and included in my centminmod.com installer http://centminmod.com/siegebenchmark_nginx.html.
with a bit of scripting you can dump siege benchmark results into csv file and feed it into gnuplot i.e. http://i.imgur.com/HV67Q.png
I appreciate the suggestions - rather than the sites that test for you for a fee, I was looking for something I could run from my LEBs. The prices Blitz.io and ImpactLoad would charge for what I need to do are higher than I'd like.
@eva2000 - Thanks for the suggestion on Siege, it was one of the packages I'd investigated and it looked decent, so I'm glad someone's been able to back my (admittedly not particularly well-informed) opinion up.
ApacheBench or blitz.io.
Contrary to what the name suggests, ApacheBench will work for any httpd.
Yes cost wise blitz.io's new pricing isn't suited for me. At the rate of stress load testing I do on a daily/weekly basis, blitz.io's new pricing policy would cost me US$500/month ! So only option was to go back to siege benchmark and extend my custom scripts, logging and chart generation so i can run it from my own servers.
I originally used Siege for an internal barrage in my wordpress caching article. http://kbeezie.com/view/caching-wordpress/ but I used Blitz.io when I was testing flood protection : http://kbeezie.com/view/nginx-protection/
At the time though, blitz.io was free, and as a result of my testing there they also added on some concurrency to my account so I'm able to do a test of up to 2k free whenever I want. I guess as kind of an early adopter bonus.
I would say LoadImpact is more consistent, and more useful data, where as blitz.io is mainly used to stress test your server or application.
Edit: I guess not free anymore, but I got 324 credits to use (with 1 credit per 1,000 concurrency). Despite the "Karl, you have invited 214 friends and earned 750 additional concurrencies."