Load Testing Your Web Applications - MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION 5-ADVANCED ADMINISTRATION Manual

Issues Affecting Successful Scalability Implementations
On the Windows platform, you make DNS entries using the Domain Name Service
Manager utility.
On UNIX platforms, you make these DNS entries in the
the DNS server's Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND).

Load testing your Web applications

Load testing is the process of defining acceptable benchmarks for your Web
application's performance and then simulating load and measuring resulting
response times and throughput against those benchmarks. You perform load testing
to measure the application's ability to scale.
This section discusses the following topics:
Reasons to perform load testing
Load testing is important to your Web site's success because it lets you test its
capacities before you deploy it, thereby enabling you to find problems and fix them
before they are exposed to your users. Determining your site's purpose and the
amount of traffic you anticipate it will receive may affect how you load test it.
Small sites that don't expect heavy concurrent loads may be able to organize and use
actual users to simultaneously access the site to perform load testing. However, this
is often a difficult activity to accomplish well because it introduces many human
variables. Therefore, it is typically not a practice that we advocate. In fact, for larger
business-critical systems that expect heavy concurrent load, this type of testing is
not feasible and will not be able to provide satisfactory nor realistic results.
A better approach to load testing is to use load simulation software. There are some
excellent software load testing tools on the market that let you simulate heavy load
hitting your Web server. By using the load testing software in conjunction with your
defined benchmarks and formal test plans, you can confidently determine if your
Web application is ready for deployment.
Another reason to load test is to verify your failover capabilities. Failover ensures that
if a primary server within a cluster of servers stops functioning, then subsequent user
requests are directed to another server within the cluster. Failover is addressed in
more depth in "What is Web Site Availability?" on page 234. Using the load testing
software of your choice, you can essentially force a server redirection by designating
a machine as "unavailable" or by shutting it down.
Note
ClusterCATS for ColdFusion uses the HTTP protocol to redirect packets of data from
a failed server to an available server. Therefore, it is important to verify that your load
testing tool can handle HTTP redirections properly before you initiate load testing.
"Reasons to perform load testing" on page 231
"How to load test your Web applications" on page 232
"Load testing considerations" on page 232
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