How to set up a load/stress test for a web site? [closed]

Question

I've been tasked with stress/load testing our company web site out of the blue and know nothing about doing so. Every search I make on google for "how to load test a web site" just comes back with various companies and software to physically do the load testing.

For now I'm more interested in how to actually go about setting up a load test like what I should take into account prior to load testing, what pages within my site I should be testing load against and what things I'm going to want to monitor when doing the test. Our web site is on a multi-tier system complete with a separate database server (IIS 7 Web Server, SQL Server 2000 db). I imagine I'd want to monitor both the web server and the database server for testing load however when setting up scenarios to load test the web server I'd have to use pages that query the database to see any load on the database server at the same time.

Are web servers and database servers generally tested simultaneously or are they done as separate tests?

As you can see I'm pretty clueless as to the whole operation so any incite as to how to go about this would be very helpful.

FYI I have been tinkering with Pylot and was able to create and run a scenario against our site but I'm not sure what I should be looking for in the results or if the scenario I created is even a scenario worth measuring for our site.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Check out JMeter. I found it a little tricky to get started with but once you have your tests setup it's easy to run. They have a tutorial on how to setup distributed testing here.

Answer 2

Generally speaking load tests will run through common scenarios with various user loads.

So for example, you might set up a test wherein 50 users login every second for 10 minutes and another where the number starts at 5 users/second and scales up to 1000 / second or whatever numbers make sense for your your site.

edit:
The idea is to test how your actual application behaves when in use across all tiers.
If you are going to be load testing, definitely invest (time and or $) in a good tool.