Question Stress Test of a server.

[WebHostingAce]

Hi,

What is the best way to stress test a server running a PHP website?

Thank you

 

[IgorG]

The easiest way is to use ab utility from another server. For example

# ab -n 1000 -c 300 domain.com/admin.php

More detail in ab help.

 

[Viktor Vogel]

Another possibility would be to use an external service like blitz.io, stormforger.com or loadstorm.com to generate lots of traffic and concurrent users to your site.

 

[Jan Löffler]

I also use blitz.io, stormforger and loadstorm as Viktor already write. These tools are great for testing professionally from outside. Alternatives are JMeter or BeesWithMachineGuns

 

[WebHostingAce]

Thank you for all your replys.

I will try blitz.io but they are not acepting new registration at the moment.

Just want ro test this Vultr Server.

2 vCores
4GB RAM
Plesk Web Pro Edition

1 Wordpress website with no Plugins for 500 concurrent users. Hope this server would be able to handle it.

 

[Jan Löffler]

The server itself should easily be able to handle this, the question is more how you tune the Webserver and WordPress config. E.g. offloading static content to NGINX and using a WordPress caching solution like WP Rocket or WP Super Cache will increase the max amount of concurrent users. The bottleneck is usually the mysql database. The solution: reduce the amount of calls to the database. Afterwards reduce the amount of PHP processes that have to be started. And so on.

 

[Viktor Vogel]

Yes, the server should be capable of doing it. As Jan already said, using internal cache (via a WP plugin) will help your server to handle it. If you want to go a step further, then you should think about a server-side caching mechanism such as Memcached or Varnish.

But you should first try it with the internal solution because this is easier to integrate and to manage.

Have success!

 

[WebHostingAce]

Thank you very much your reply. Plesk Team have been very helpful as always!

I'm still waiting to blitz.io to accept new registration.

meantime I tried Igor's suggestion

# ab -n 10000 -c 300 domain.com/admin.php (With 10000) from another server.

Then,

On the target server I ran,

#netstat | grep http | wc -l

I can browse the website up to around result 3000 from command #netstat | grep http | wc -l

I'm not sure does it mean it can hadle about 3000 connections.

Any comment will be highly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[Viktor Vogel]

Hi AusWeb,

you could use something like this:

# lsof -i | grep servername:http(s)

to see the open connections.

To show just the total number, simply use:

# lsof -i | grep -oc servername:http(s)

Change servername to the correct name of your server.

See image for better understanding (hint: the number varies because one more connection was opened during I typed the command):


Regarding blitz.io:

I already asked the support team in January about this issue and they just said that they work on it and it will take some time. If it is still deactivated, then I think that you shouldn't wait for it...

Have success!

Cheers