What web stress tools do people here recommend? I am specifically testing a new php site with mysql database. I want to see how many users can access and use my site at the same time. I have no experience with this type of thing.

All unix-like systems with apache installed usually have an utility called 'ab' (apache benchmark). If you have shell access to some unix-like server you can run this test to get average number of requests per seconds that your server can handle.

Can you explain how to go about doing this via cPanel?

i have WHM access too so should have the right perms...

Thanks,

With the apache benchmark, can you test multiple pages and queries at once simulating a user on your site? Simulating 50 users on your site? If so, how do you do this?

You cannot test multiple pages at once, but you can simulate multiple concurrent requests to the single page/script to test the performance of that certain script. In fact there is no reason to test many pages at once since each script should be optimized separately.

It would be apprieciated if someone could still explain how to do this and how to tell it how many users to test and all that if you dont mind

And how do you do it in cpanel cause this seems ideal to use

^ What he said X 10

You can't access ab through cpanel, you will need ssh access . This site has a generic tutorial on how to get it done: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-...eb-server.html

Create a new user in cpanel with shell access, and login using something like PuTTy and follow the tutorial above.

ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://www.yoursite.com/yourscript.php
This will request the specified url 1000 times in blocks of 100 simultaneous requests, which can be used to simulate 100 users requesting a page at the same time.

Test will output many different numbers out of which you are most interested in number of requests per second the script can handle. Normally it should be not less than 1 reqs/sec even if your script makes requests to DB and not less than 5 reqs/sec if the script does not access the DB.

I logged in to SSH through the java tool in CPanel to try the ab command.
At the command line it said:
myusername@mydomain.com [~]#

directly after that I typed:
$ ab -n 10 -c 2 http://www.mydomain.com/

It came back and said:
-bash: $: command not found

I then tried just:
ab -n 10 -c 2 http://www.mydomain.com/

And it said:
-bash: ab: command not found

What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for your help

Probably you don't have ab installed or it is not visible within the current $PATH values. Try running "find / -name ab" without quotes to find the full path to ab and then run ab with full path.

I believe that ab is not accessible to standard users.
In both my server and workstation (gentoo & ubuntu), it's installed in /usr/sbin, meaning that only an administrator should be able to run it.

Another tool I have used from my workstation, is Jmeter [ http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/index.html ], a java app from the apache foundation.
Here is a simple web page test plan, that I used to get used to Jmeter: [ http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/use...test-plan.html ]

Just answerd what i was going to post tripy, i must remember to look at that when i get home!

You usually have to ask for SSH access.

Dammit guys, how do you manage to get paid hosting without shell and ab?

because most hosts (which arn't 13 AND have a brian) know its VERY bad to give it to idiots. (im not saying anyones a idiot its just there are plenty out there)

And hence why in most cases all u have to do is send a nice polite email, asking can i have it so i can use the ab thing. and i would guess they would allow it

which reminds me i need to send a email

I have been talking to my web host about this and they wrote back:

It is installed along with Apache and available as /usr/local/apache/bin/ab.

For examle:
/usr/local/apache/bin/ab -n 10 -c 2 http://www.yoururl.net/index.php

Right now it told me:
-bash: /usr/local/apache/bin/ab: Permission denied

So I am working on that now.

bash: /usr/local/apache/bin/ab: Permission denied

The file permissions are too restrictive...
You cannot do anything, ask your host to put you in a group where you have execution privilege to that file

Yes, I got it to work now.

I was logging in as a regular user. I logged in as root and it work.

Thanks for all your help.