Questions[load-testing](server)

This is a canonical question about capacity planning for databases.

Related:

• Can you help me with my capacity planning?
• How do you do load testing and capacity planning for web sites?

I'm looking to create a canonical question of tools and methods of capacity planning for databases. This is intended to be a canonical question.

Obviously, the general workflow is:

• Put your scenario in place
• Add monitoring
• Add traffic
• Evaluate results
• Remediate based on results
• Rinse, repeat until reasonably happy

Please feel free to describe different tools and techniques for different web-servers, frameworks, etc., as well as best-practices.

This is a canonical question about capacity planning for web sites.

Related:

• Can you help me with my capacity planning?
• How do you do load testing and capacity planning for databases?

What are some recommended tools and methods of capacity planning for web sites and web-applications?

Please feel free to describe different tools and techniques for different web-servers, frameworks, etc., as well as best-practices that apply to web servers in general.

Is there a good command line utility to monitor hard disk load on linux? Something like top but then monitoring disk activity i.s.o. cpu usage.

More specifically, I suspect that for some (heavy load) servers after several optimizations on various parts of the program(s) that run on it, right now the bottleneck is simply the logging to files on the disk. But I find it very difficult to assess how much traffic the servers can handle.

My ideal tool would be something that prints "You're using 35% of your disk bandwidth right now". Any ideas?

Not going into specifics on the specs since I know there is no real answer for this. But I've been doing load testing today with the ab command in apache.

And got to the number of 70 requests per second (1000 requests with 100 concurrent users), on a page that is loading from 4 different DB tables, and doing some manipulation with the data. So it's a fairly heavy page.

The server isn't used for anything else for now and the load on it is just me, since it's in development. But the application will be used daily by many users.

But is this enough? Or should I even worry (just as long as it's over X requests a second)

I'm thinking that I shouldn't worry but I'd like some tips on this.

I've had to load test HTTP servers/web applications a few times, and each time I've been underwhelmed by the quality of tools I've been able to find.

So, when you're load testing a HTTP server, what tools do you use? And what are the things I'll most likely do wrong the next time I've got to do it?