Fun with load testing.

[agrikk]

I killed my server today and I'm typing this little story as I hope and pray that the noc can bring my server back to life:

I've been tasked with a new deployment of Segue's Silk Central Performance Manager here at work that will ultimately be used to stress test our web farm and predict loads for the Christmas rush.

Anyone ever use this product?

Today I did a throwaway install of the client load testing piece and for shitz and giggles, pointed it at my personal server, located in a colo facility. It's a home built AMD 1.4GHz on some cheap ass motherboard with 768 mb ram and U160 drives in a mirrored RAID array.

I set up a test of 55 users performing search functions against my site to test the MySQL/PHP ability.



It died a hard death, freezing solid after only 37 users hopped on. 37 users.


I think this is quite the lesson in humility and an object lesson of why you probably don't want to reaid the old parts box and you want to spend more than $200 on your server.


37 users. Crap.

 

[bob]

My PII-400 Dell gagged with 10 users on YaBB, or about 1070 hits per hour. That poor thing never crashed, but delivered the forum page very slowly.