In today’s world, organizations are fast accepting
web and related applications as part of their overall business strategies. They understand that Internet provides them with potential to target a very focused set of customers spread across a very diverse geography. For a successful Internet presence, it is important that web server and web applications are reliable, scalable and always available, irrespective of traffic volumes to site.
To achieve this, you must test all your hardware and software using tools to check your website, usually called web stress tools. These tools should ideally be used even before site is on World Wide Web. They can provide a reasonably good estimate about performance of your website and a company can identify issues before they arise.
Such issues might include slow response times while opening website, a limited number of users able to simultaneously browse website, or a cap on number of requests that can be handled by a processing application. Based on results, a webmaster can identify bottlenecks and take corrective actions before they result in lost sales.
What does website stress testing do?
Web stress testing provides performance reports for varying elements. For example, users might be complaining that your shopping site is taking ages to load and most search results are showing errors message. Using a web stress tool, you can check performance of your web server. To your surprise, CPU utilization on Server may be just 20%. But if you are also monitoring database application, you might find that it is already running at 100% and is most likely reason for poor performance.
Stress tools can be deployed as software solutions where you can monitor key components of your servers such as CPU, memory and hard disk utilizations. They are built with user-defined alerts that can be triggered if a particular parameter crosses a threshold set by user. As an example, you can configure an alert that must be generated whenever CPU utilization crosses 80% mark. Although this is helpful in identifying system bottlenecks, results are limited to web servers that are connected to your internal network.
