Stress testing a hosted IIS server

Question

I have a hosted environment that is migrating to some new hardware. I need to stress this new implementation remotely. Is there a quick and clean way to do this? I don't need anything fancy, just page hits and it doesn't need to have massive volume.

Thanks!

Went with the Web Application Stress Tool. SImple and straight forward. Thanks for the answers guys!! — Craig, Jun 09 '09 at 21:29

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 09 '09 at 18:01

6

You can use the stress tools Microsoft provides:

either Web Capacity Analysis Tool (from the reskit) or the Web Application Stress Tool

answered Jun 09 '09 at 18:01

Jim B

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score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 09 '09 at 18:37

I assume you have a Linux machine around. If you don't install one. :)

This will time how much time does it take to pull 1000 pages from the server:

time for i in `seq 1000`; do wget http://127.0.0.1/~elcuco/test.php; done

Now, how about concurrent loads? There is a utility called "apache benchmark", lets have a test:

ab -c 20 -n 100  http://127.0.0.1/~elcuco/test.php

This pulls 100 pages, while keeping 20 concurrent downloads. Here is a real life demo, it's self explaining.

[elcuco@pinky ~]$ /usr/sbin/ab -c 20 -n 100 http://serverfault.com/questions/22785/stress-testing-a-hosted-iis-server
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev <$Revision: 1.146 $> apache-2.0
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright 2006 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking serverfault.com (be patient).....done


Server Software:        Microsoft-IIS/7.0
Server Hostname:        serverfault.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /questions/22785/stress-testing-a-hosted-iis-server
Document Length:        30691 bytes

Concurrency Level:      20
Time taken for tests:   19.642924 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      3151576 bytes
HTML transferred:       3129271 bytes
Requests per second:    5.09 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       3928.585 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       196.429 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          156.65 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:      266  480 506.2    397    3328
Processing:  1227 3236 1559.4   2963    9943
Waiting:      287  495 277.6    443    1836
Total:       1499 3716 1613.2   3433   10285

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   3433
  66%   4040
  75%   4321
  80%   4953
  90%   6056
  95%   6795
  98%   9139
  99%  10285
 100%  10285 (longest request)

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 09 '09 at 18:00

3

Here ya go. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231282

answered Jun 09 '09 at 18:00

MathewC

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score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 09 '09 at 19:11

Application Center Test (ACT) if you have Visual Studio
Web Stress tool and if you want something non-microsoft,
ANTS from Red-gate has done well for us in the past.
NUnitASP if you want something free which will fire HTTP requests at a website.

All of these allow you to built scripts that will fire requests at a web server to see the response time. I like ACT because its runner shows an instananeous readout of requests/second as the script runs.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 09 '09 at 17:51

Multiple parallel "wget --mirror" instances? >smile< Can't get much simpler than that.

W/o knowing more about the site's use of server-side resources (database queries, etc), it's difficult to give you a "generic" test idea that's very concrete. There are lots of HTTP load testing tools out there, commercial and open source. If you know what particular pages generate the most server-side load, you could focus on those pages with one of those tools.

Stress testing a hosted IIS server

5 Answers5