I was asked to put some load on one of our servers yesterday using our functional testing harness (Selenium), but I knew this wasn’t going to generate enough load to make a real stab at stressing the server. We don’t have a genuine load testing harness here, so what to do?
I remembered at my last job I had experimented with OpenSTA for load testing, and it seemed to work pretty well. It does, supposedly, have some issues with https (allegedly you can work around these, but I’ve not tried it yet) but it is free, and very easy to get running. I popped it onto a VM and poof! Instant load tester. Now, obviously the test I ran was the most rudimentary imaginable, but I can expand on it later should there be need.
Overall, I am very pleased with OpenSTA and should the https issue become a problem, I can probably use the success of this initial usage to possibly get funding for a product that handles it better. For now, though, I couldn’t be happier with it.
Print | posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 8:00 AM