Heyas, BH>Anyone know of good guides or general info on BH>performance testing and emulating real use of BH>an application.
As a general rule, it's easiest if you have a production system already running. Record all information that you need to reproduce the requests (typically, HTTP request headers and POST data if applicable), from a production server and you can replay any amount of data on a sandboxed QA environment. You can either eliminate or proportionally shorten the time period between requests to space out load arbitrarily. This is extremely effective if you have enough real user data because you're not inventing user load. You're using real user load. I don't know of any product that does this all at once, but it's not hard to hack together. If your site is entirely GET based, you can probably just make do with parsing access logs and turning those into requests. I believe Apache::DumpHeaders might get you most of the way on the capturing side if you need special headers, cookies, or POST information. Feeding scripts into commercial products like SilkPerformer will give you the best client side testing and reports. However, a homebrew Perl user agent will do okay, too. Unfortunately, ab doesn't support taking in a custom URL workload. For a simple record/replay load test tool that works remarkably well, check out the resource CD that ships with Windows 2000 and you will find the Microsoft Web Stress Tester. It's free and GUI based and can record IE sessions and replay them with an arbitrary number of threads. It uses Access databases to hold the tests and results so you can probably use Perl on Windows to populate it with your custom tests. Humbly, Andrew ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Ho http://www.tellme.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice 650-930-9062 Tellme Networks, Inc. 1-800-555-TELL Fax 650-930-9101 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
