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Blogs » Archive for May 7th, 2007
Besiege Your Web Application - Load Testing over HTTP
When performance tuning a system, it’s vital that you continually monitor the effect of any changes that you make. Instrumentation should be put in place to provide continual access to consistent metrics.
Web applications are no different. They can be complex beasts, however, so you may benefit from many different layers of instrumentation. If you’re building on a feature-rich framework, you probably have access to timers and counters within your code. These are very useful for telling you how long different stages of your application take to execute, and can count and time calls to external systems, such as SQL queries.
Sometimes, however, you need a view of the bigger picture - a benchmark that more accurately represents the performance your users experience, and encompasses all aspects of servicing their request, including network latency and HTTP server overhead.
Siege is a free UNIX (Linux / Mac OS etc) tool from JoeDog Software which provides just that.
Siege is an http regression testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure the performance of their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP …
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