My Opera News

Here at MyOpera we are currently researching on some stress testing applications. Basically, we want to be able to:

• evaluate the impact of performance-related code changes simulating real production load
• have a "cache warm up" procedure

Tools of the trade

There are many stress testing applications out there. We are still looking for alternatives, but so far these seems roughly what we need:

• httperf - a simple HTTP threaded performance measuring application written by HP research labs
• siege - multithreaded stress testing load generator, flexible and simple to use
• jmeter - a Java desktop application that can visually define workload for stress testing, lots of possibilities. Can also analyze web server logs and replicate production load. IMHO, the interface sucks badly.

There's also another common tool for database-only stress testing, super-smack. Probably we will use this for db queries optimization and benchmarking.

Progress so far...

Siege has been the simplest and quickest to set up and use. We already built some custom workload profiles for MyOpera, to test cache contention with production-like load and to warm up our cache/backend servers after application upgrades. It could also be used as a simple functional test tool, for instance to verify that a list of urls are working correctly. But we already have that, and Jmeter is much better for that purpose.

BTW, if there's anyone with JMeter experience, please speak up! I'd love to hear from you... :-)