MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION 4.5-ADMINISTRING COLDFUSION SERVER Manual page 165

Chapter 6: Creating Scalable and Highly Available Web Sites
How to load test your Web applications
One of the first things you need to do to be able to load test is purchase a load testing
software tool and learn how to use it. There are a variety of good load testing software
tools on the market, including RSW's e-TEST Suite (which includes a load testing
component called e-LOAD), Segue's SilkPerformer, Rational Software's
PerformanceStudio, and Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner. Each of these packages
provide substantial Web-enabled software testing solutions that will help you
effectively simulate and test load.
After you purchase, install, and learn to use the load testing software, you need to
determine benchmarks that you want to or must achieve for your Web site to ensure a
good user experience. Following that, you must formalize your testing strategy by
designing and developing written test plans against which you'll execute your tests.
Once your test plans are written and approved, it's time to run the tests. After you do
so, you need to capture and analyze the load testing results and report the statistics to
the development team. From there, you'll need to reach consensus about what are the
most serious problems you discovered, what are the necessary changes to make, and
what is the best way to implement the fixes. After the changes are made and a new
build of the application is available, you'll rerun the tests to look for performance
improvements. Again, you'll reanalyze the testing results and continue this cycle until
the site is operating within the established parameters that you've set. When your team
agrees that the site scales well and is operating at peak performance under heavy
stress, you're ready to deploy the application into a production environment.
Load testing considerations
Before starting your load testing, consider the following:
Define benchmarks early
Make sure you understand your Web site's performance and scalability
requirements before you start running tests against your site. Otherwise, you
won't know what you're testing for and the statistics you capture won't have
significance. Also, remember that the benchmarks you define should be
customized for the current application; don't simply reuse benchmarks from an
earlier site on which you may have worked. Each Web application is often
distinct in terms of its design, construction, backoffice integration, and user
experience requirements.
Ensure the test environment mirrors the production environment
Create a test environment that is identical as much as possible to the actual
production environment in which the Web site will be hosted. If you don't
simulate a similar network and bandwidth scenario, or use the same types of
servers, or ensure that the same versions of software (operating system, service
packs, Web server, and third-party tools) reside on both the test and production
important to verify that your load testing tool can handle HTTP
redirections properly before you initiate load testing.
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