Stress testing web apps
 

I want to break my web app.

The most crucial parts that people access the most... I wanna slam the hell out of them with 400+ users/requests a second if possible. That way I can find the slowest parts of the app, optimize it, and move on.

In otherwords, I'd like to simulate a slashdotting on my own machine.

I've never really had much experience with stress testing, so does anyone know of any *good* programs/tools that would let me do this?

Apache flood
 

The apache flood project has exactly what you want. You can set up different actors to take different scripts on the page, if your page uses sessions or anything like that, you can setup regex's to pickup the sessionid's and use them on the rest of the site.

It also allows you to install flood on multiple machines, and run a distributed flood system, with the primary flood process bringing back all of the timing info.

http://httpd.apache.org/test/flood/

Thank you much! I will give that a try :D

Hm, no go on this. It doesn't compile for some reason.

As the site states, I did:

./buildconf
./configure --disable-shared
make all

Fails on syntax errors within the flood_net.h file around the "apr_pollfd_t" statement.

I did a ./configure && make all on the apr folder, it did it's thing.. retried the flood compile.. same error.

Any ideas?

Built for me
 

Hrm... I tried it, and it built for me on Debian/unstable.

Did you check it out of CVS? You might want to run a 'cvs update' to make sure that you have the latest. Someone could have checked in some bad code.

If the CVS update doesn't fix it, what version of GCC are you using? Also, what distro?