Best practices for performance benchmarking test..

Question

I have a J2EE web-application running on Sun hardware with OpenSolaris/Glassfish stack. We're starting our performance benchmarking tests, to prepare for our scalability requirements later.

Any guidelines/best practices would be very useful..

Answer 1

I'm sure there is many generic ways to test server performance to be found on the web.

But have you thought that perhaps this an opportunity to gather stories and write a test tuned to exactly how your users will use the server? Even if it doesn't perfectly reflect the way that the server will ultimately work, it will let you start learning something rather than being only formal exercise. I think this is the spirit of agile development.

Answer 2

For a free Open Source tool I've found Apache's Jmeter pretty good: http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

As Joe said you'll need to figure out how to model user behaviour and simulate user load.