How Do You Stress-Test a Server?

Cody Pendant has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm involved in a project which uses PHP and SQL in a web-board system, and it's been suggested we ought to stress-test it by simulating numerous/frequent hits, as part of the beta process.

How would that normally be done in Perl? What tools are available to do it? What are we testing for -- slowing down of the server? Slowing down of HTTP response times?
--

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[download]

2002-02-10 Edit by Corion: Changed PRE tags in signature to CODE tags, reformatted sig.

Comment on How Do You Stress-Test a Server? Download Code

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Re: How Do You Stress-Test a Server? by screamingeagle (Curate) on Feb 10, 2002 at 11:13 UTC
If you need to simulate large numbers of users against your Web application, one useful tool (free tool,might i add) is the Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool ... i've used it on sites running php and oracle, and it works quite well... here's an article which contains a download link (and describes how to use it ) Stress Test Tool	[reply]
Re: How Do You Stress-Test a Server? by gellyfish (Monsignor) on Feb 10, 2002 at 10:24 UTC
Although not in Perl you might want to look at the tool `ab` that comes from the Apache distribution - it is specifically designed for measuring the number of pages per second the web server can serve. /J\	[reply] [d/l]
Re: How Do You Stress-Test a Server? by Ryszard (Priest) on Feb 10, 2002 at 09:48 UTC
There are a million methods to do load testing. Check out Rational, they have stuff that is supposed to be quite good.	[reply]
Re: How Do You Stress-Test a Server? by drfrog (Deacon) on Feb 10, 2002 at 19:09 UTC
i would also suggest ab as gellyfish has another apache offering is the new apache test platform , a sub project of apache itself http://httpd.apache.org/test/ in there you will find flood , afaik ab next gen, and the perl framework, i think you should be able to devise some perl tests that can test your php/sql system also you may want to look at siege, you can find it through freshmeat if you need any help lemme know, i have lots of notes and some sample scripts.	[reply]