We are always very enthusiastic about traffic: we think the more visitors our website attracts, the more profitable our e-business must be. Well, that’s right, but, unfortunately, only to a certain limit. Too many visitors cause huge load on web server and network components, which results in website slowdown or even failure, web applications crash, and, consequently, customer dissatisfaction and distrust. What should be done? You must prepare for high traffic, find the bottlenecks in your web applications, and know exactly how many users your web server can handle without any risk of slowdown. External web load stress test might help you.
The easiest way to find the weak points of your web server and your network is to perform a web load stress test. Nowadays you can easily find a lot of both internal and external stress testing solutions. The internal tools, no matter how complex and expensive they are, have one common drawback: they are installed either on the web server that is to be tested, or on a computer, which belongs to the same network as the web server. Of course, this approach cannot give “clean” results, as in this case the testing application shares the hardware resources it should examine.
External web load stress testing solutions, on the contrary, are outside your network, which allows them to provide the most comprehensive picture of your web server behavior under heavy traffic load. An advanced external stress testing service usually has several testing agents (servers) situated in different parts of the world. The agents can simulate up to 10 000 simultaneous Internet visitors! Each simulated user may go through your web applications several times, that’s why the generated traffic may be really overwhelming. Of course, it’s up to you to choose how many “users” will connect to your web server and how many times.
What should you do during the test?
Your primary task is to monitor your web server hardware resources, such as CPU load, RAM, and hard disk usage. Your stress testing service provider will generate an extensive report for you, but your own logs will help you immensely.
Why is precise timing so important?
You must do your best not to miss the moment, when stress testing starts, that’s why the precise time on your system is the key issue here. The most serious stress testing services are synchronized with atomic clocks.