"stress testing" PHP

[Anon]

Hi all. Hoping someone can lend some advice here.

I work at an institution who's website is served up by Oracle's OAS 4.0.8.2, and the sysadmin has recently gotten PHP running on our test server.

He's asked that I do some "stress testing" of the test server, specifically PHP, and what I'm wondering is what the heck would I do to test it?

I've developed a number of websites and applications in PHP, but honestly I'm not sure as to how I could "stress test" it.

If anyone has any tips or advice, I'm very eager to hear them.

Sincerely,

Pablo Gosse

[ziggs]

Hit it as many times as possible and have the same information come out at the same time to different browswers. Just to see if your sever gets bogged down. It shouldn't matter because your using Oracle and PHP. Two of the most powerful (if not the most) web oriented tools together. So I wouldn't even stress about your server stressing. I think it will be fine.
Ziggs

[mistcat]

That being said: there are a number of perl scripts to hammer a webserver with requests, you could pretty easily modify one of those to keep track of some stats and then see what kind of strain your server has putting out data.

I.E. request some information from the database on a php page, make it change what its requesting based on something like the system time. Then fire up the perl scripts to request that page, note how many requests are successful by the scripts, average time for a response, etc. Then you'll have some numbers to give him.