How to perform Load testing

Anon

I'm going to be posting my site public soon and it's running a MySQL backend. I'm projecting probably a 30-100 users simultaneously at full load and I want to perform some sort of load testing.

Anyone have a script or automated (ie. easy) way of doing this and figuring out how my server will handle this?

Anon

Wow that must be one hugely popular site, at 100 concurrent mysql queries :-)

What I did to do a load test on unix was to create a copy of a
php script that could run without user input (without needing form or URL data).
Then I wrote a shell script that used the CGI version of PHP to start 20 copies of that page at the same time.

Then I just sat back and relaxed as my server's performance went down :-)

Oh, and to find out how fast the server was responding I used the microtime()
function to mark the time at the beginning and end of a script and print the difference.

Anon

like just make an php script to fopen a page on my site 20 times concurrently?

Anon

That is an option.

Write a php script to fopen your page 100 times, and use your browser to start that script in 5 differenct windows (to get 5 copies of the script running at the same time)

Anon

So I guess just print out an elapsed time after each script runs?

Anon

Yes I do.

I have a small routine around the mysql statement and around the whole page so I can see how long they both take.
This way I can easily see if my PHP or my mysql is slow

Anon

Use ab (Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool).

It should be available on any Unixlike system; type "man ab" for details.

Anon

I have no man entry for "ab". Doesn't seem available on the linux server that my site is hosted at?

Anon

It probably was removed from the server by the ISP for good reason -- you don't put anything on a server that isn't necessary. Some village idiot will figure out how to misuse it.

To get any idea of real-world performance you probably don't want to run ab on the server anyway. Run it on another box and point it at the server.

But if your server is hosted by an ISP, please consider that any load test may be regarded as a denial of service attack. Talk with your ISP before running a test.