How to test 1000 clients windows 7 clients

Question

We have .net clients running on Windows 7 embedded with sql server express. These run disconnected and every so often will dial in to a central server and dump their information and pull down pertinent new info. We want to do a stress test of the entire distributed system and are trying to think of a cost effective way to do this. One of our devs had the idea to use amazon cloud and spin up a 1000 clients, but they only support windows server O/S and looks like it could run into some money if you have to re-run the test multiple times which is likely.

We thought about simulating the 1000 clients all on one machine, which would pretend to have a 1000 clients and make all the calls asynchronously, but if you are running on one machine some of your ceilings will be RAM and processor of one machine versus a larger system, so I'm not sure how "real" of a picture it will give us.

All the calls happen with WCF between the client and server.

Anyone have any experience in this area and if so how did you tackle it?

thanks,

Super Timmy

Answer 1

Have you looked at SOASTA? They provide cloud-based SOA loadtesting.