Simulating Heavy Usage in Rails / Heroku

Question

Is there a tool that can help me simulate high levels of usage of my rails app? I'm looking to test how responsive it will stay as usage grows. I'm deploying on Heroku and I'd like to know at what point to add additional capacity.

Something that could also give me performance stats would be especially useful.

Answer 1

The Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool is what you are looking for: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html

Then run your test with

ab -c 20 -n 5000 http://www.yourdomain.com/

to see the performance of you application with 20 consecutive requests and 5,000 requests in total.

Read this and this on heroku performance.

Answer 2

You can use JMeter (free) to test your dev and production site. You also can use something like BLITZ.IO but it'll cost money (free service has a duration/user limit).