Load testing tools and tips

[thomas07vt (John Thomas)]

Hi All, I was wondering what people are using to test User load on their Rails apps.

I am wanting to make sure that my app hosted on Heroku will handle n Users/ find out at what load performance will degrade. What tools do you guys use, and what metrics to you look to validate that your app is “production ready”? Blitz looks like a good option. Has anyone here used that add-on?

• What tools do you guys use
• What metrics do you guys look at to validate that your app can sustain a certain load
• Any tips that you guys have on identifying hot spots or improving performace

Thanks!
John

[ghanima (Craig Hancock)]

I heard good things about blitz.io however I personally like to do loadtesting on my own.

Tools wise at a minimum I try to find the following.

• A Threaded capable http client
  • curb:Ruby gem that takes advantage of libcurl c bindings: GitHub - taf2/curb: Ruby bindings for libcurl
  • HTTP: Celluloid http client(very fast) GitHub - httprb/http: HTTP (The Gem! a.k.a. http.rb) - a fast Ruby HTTP client with a chainable API, streaming support, and timeouts
• Webdriver Frameworks
• Watir: An automated web testing framework that supports webdriver. Nice features such as
  • Taking screenshots of Rendered HTML pages
  • Represent Site navigation as a ruby object: GitHub - cheezy/page-object: Gem to implement PageObject pattern in watir-webdriver and selenium-webdriver
• • webdriver-performance: collects and summarises metrics speficied in the W3C Navigation web:
    -https://github.com/p0deje/watir-dom-wait: GitHub - timkoopmans/watir-webdriver-performance: This gem collects and summarises metrics speficied in the W3C Navigation web performance specifications at http://w3c-test.org/webperf/specs/NavigationTiming/ when using watir-webdriver and a compatible browser

The above tools allow for you generate client request rate at multiple speeds and measure response at http response level and simulate full client rendering.

If you don’t need something so advance I would recommend tools such as

• apache bench:
• httpperf

The above tools are load generating tools that takes one argument a number of request and single uri path to test.

Let me know if you have any additional questions

[thomas07vt (John Thomas)]

Awesome, thanks. Those are great resources @ghanima!