On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, G.W. Haywood wrote:
> > I need to prove to myself and my marketing guy that my script has
> > certain statistical properties, not the least of which is the
> > question of whether my activity logs match what actually happened.
>
> You've been spending too much time with your marketing guy. "Certain
> statistical properties" is gobbledygook. What properties?
able to handle N hits in M seconds with a maximum of K concurrent
sessions in any given second, L percent of the hits on these files,
J percent of the hits on this handler, U percent of these with these
parameters and W percent with those.
You add more to the list.
It's a perfectly sensibly thing to do, also from a technical
standpoint.
Maybe you've spend too little time on larger sites where those
things matters. ;-)
> Activity logs don't match statistically. Either they match or
> they don't. If they don't then either the logging is turned off
> or it isn't working.
Ha. Ask [ insert name of large internet advertising company ] about
that. Actually, just ask any given internet advertising company
about that. (in that industry the logs are real money and not just
input data to get pretty colored graphs).
More to the point: What do you know about how Christopher is
logging? Maybe he is using mod_log_spread or something fancy like
that and is unsure if it's working correctly.
> > Also, there's concurrency issues to make sure I've got right.
>
> Get yourself a bunch of users.
It's a real hassle to be dependent on thousands of users just to
exercise your test environment.
Christopher, depending on what you need to test and what kind of
site you have I'd look at (some combination of)
http_load - http://www.acme.com/software/http_load/ - to test how
your site can handle large amounts of hits to random combinations of
a predefined list of urls.
ab - comes with apache, see src/support/ab(\.[ch])? - good for
testing performance parameters of a certain URL.
LWP - Roll your own tests with the LWP modules to have an automated
test of functionality of the site.
- ask
--
ask bjoern hansen - <http://www.netcetera.dk/~ask/>
more than 70M impressions per day, <http://valueclick.com>
