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My situation is that I have just taken over a web team who host all of their clients websites using a server provided by Clook

The websites have a functionality where the client's customers can sign up for a mailing list via a web form and the client then will be able to sign in to the marketing tool, which is Interspire Email Marketer, and send out emails to all those who have subscribed.

EM (Email marketer software) is installed on the Clook server and is currently being used with no issues. However, we are considering adding another 300-500 users to EM and I need to make sure that the server can handle it and will not be negatively affected in any way. We can't afford to just go with trial and error as ALL of our websites are hosted from that server and it will be costly for those sites to go down.

I'm very new to the whole server field so I am wondering if someone can advice me on what I need to check and how I can ensure that we can add those new users without any issues.

I've already looked at the specs of the server: 7 core CPU, 9216MB MEMORY (doesn't state what type of memory this is), 220GB SSD, Port speed 100MB. I have access to the server so can check other info if required.

Any advice would be super helpful, thank you.

Zaine Abaddin
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The only way you tell whether your server can support 300-500 users is testing it and measuring response time, number of requests per second, number of errors, resources consumption, etc.

So you basically need to mimic a real user which does what it is supposed to be doing on HTTP protocol level.

  1. Choose a load testing tool: there is quite a number of free and open source load testing tools at the market now
  2. Create a load test scenario(s) representing real user's behaviour (some tools provide record-and-replay functionality, some will require writing the code)
  3. Ensure that the test tool creates the same network footprint as the real browser (requests and responses are the same apart from some dynamic data), you can check this using a sniffer tool like Wireshark
  4. Once you're happy with your test you can parameterize it and supply 300 - 500 credentials and run your test with the anticipated amount of virtual users
  5. Check whether the performance metrics match your expectations and there are no errors. Also it worth checking CPU, RAM, Swap, Network and Disk usage to see the impact of 500 users in terms of used resources.
Dmitri T
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  • Thank you, i know its been a while but just been so buys. you're advise was great. Its lead me to find out a whole lot more about testing tools and gain a better understanding around this whole thing. thank you – Zaine Abaddin Nov 10 '19 at 14:17