How to simulate high traffic load on a web application?

Question

Hi, I wrote a Python web API that may get large amounts of requests per day. I want to test load levels before I go any further.

What is the best way to simulate large amounts of traffic on my localhost web application? Is there a (linux compatible) tool that will send large amounts of requests to a localhost URL?

Answer 1

a simple tool to generate load is the apache bench that comes with the apache server

for more facny loadtests give jmeter a try

Answer 2

There are a number of load testing tools available: http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php

They typically work by running through a predetermined list of pages, passing data to those pages as necessary, and recording the response times.

Some tools spread the load across multiple machines, some simply issue x number of connections from your machine.

Answer 3

I found a decent looking list here. One of them may work for you. I have also used Watir (FireWatir in your case) scripts for smaller load tests in the 10-20 user range.

Answer 4

Its not exactly what you might be looking for but we now use loadimpact on a lot of projects. Sometimes we have to code special urls to be hit but... all in its been pretty good.

url http://loadimpact.com/