Web Server Stress Testing : Tutorial /Review

darthcamaro writes "I found an interesting article on builder.com that suggests laying 'Siege' to your server to help you setup up a site to withstand /. "One of the great fears for many Web developers, and even more so for Web server admins, is watching their sites brought down by an avalanche of traffic. The traffic may be from a DoS attack, or maybe the site just got slash-dotted. Bottom line: It just isn't available.""

siege is only the first layer

[drfrog]

stress testing based on concurrent users hitting script etc is fine,
but there are other things to make sure of, returnin information and the like

check out the perl module called webtest or something like that

Web Testing should Include External Traffic

[stecoop]

One item this article didn't explicitly look at was the network saturation percentage.

Most servers can handle a greater load than the network traffic can handle. To demonstrate a proper test you would need to test outside of your routers and firewall. This means that the test machines should be located outside of your local area network while testing or at least a certain quantitative percentage for statistical purposes.

Odds are most people are going to work within the LAN and lay Siege to their machines but forget that there is an outside world.