Performance and Stress Testing

Filed in archive Application Development on November 15, 2005

One assignment I've have this past week required me to "stress test and benchmark" a web application. That sounds pretty straightforward but it gets a little strange when there is not a commercial package involved. I'm a person that likes to use Open Source products whenever I can. That tendency led me to a couple of Open Source products that worked out well but in the end I found I could not use either one for my purposes.

The first tool I will mention is called JMeter. JMeter is an Apache Project that is based on Java. It works well and even has the ability to record, through a proxy, web-browsing sessions for playback. This is what I started with and then went back and edited for my purposes. However, the application was not entirely plug and play since I did have to go back to the documentation a number of times to get things going. But what does a person expect for free. I suppose if I wanted more I could volunteer to improve the product myself so I'm not complaining. JMeter has come a long way since I tried it a few years ago.

The second web stressing and benchmarking tool is called AB and it is an Apache project as well. This product is does not have a GUI front-end like JMeter but I found that very useful. With AB a developer can export statistics about a certain web page or group of pages to a comma or tab delimited file. Once that is done it is possible to import that file into Microsoft Excel. The delimited file can even have a row of headers included in the export so a person knows what they are looking at in the file. A cool way to use AB is for a developer to write a batch process to hit a number of web pages and then schedule that batch file to execute in a cron job periodically. That developer would that be able to create an Excel file and, hypothetically, show it to a user community to say "see the pages are being returned in under 5 seconds with a load of 100 concurrent users." ;-)

The down side of both of these tools was the inability of me to easily figure out how to get SSL working with them. In theory they both have the ability to work with SSL but I wasted half a day trying to get either one going. Again, I should put up or shut up since they are both open source projects. If anyone is aware of how to get one of these tools working with SSL or if there is a better tool available let please share your knowledge?