how to test a web site to see how much punishment it can take before crashing?

Question

My boss wants me to test our web application to demonstrate how much traffic the web site can handle.

The app is a JSF/JPA/Oracle application, everything is running on one rack mounted server at a local hosting company's data centre.

The truth is, we don't know how much traffic it can handle before it gets unresponsive or shuts down altogether.

What would be a good way to pound on the web app from the internet, simulating tonnes of traffic? I was thinking of setting up a number of different Amazon EC2 virtual machines and getting them to pretend to be web visitors, but is there some kind of software I can run on these machines so they behave like lots of web visitors?

Also, it doesn't have to be free, I'd be willing to apy for a solution or a tool.

Any suggestions or help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks, Rob

Answer 1

Try this, mate:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/programs/ab.html

Answer 2

Did you try setting up Selenium-Grid to run tests in parallel. This will simulate actual user actions on the application and in-turn can stress the app server. You can install a performance monitoring utility on the server to monitor the load generated.

Or you could also use J Meter to simulate multiple users accessing your application. You can talk to your network admin team to route this traffic via internet instead of your local internet.