[lug] Suggestions for Burn-In testing

[Zan Lynx]

On Thu, 2005-07-07 at 12:48 -0600, George Sexton wrote:
> I'm in the process of configuring a new server that will run SUSE Linux 9.3
> (already got it installed).
> 
> I've run Memtest86 on it, but I was thinking about some sort of software
> that could do some disk write loading, and misc. stability tests. I'd like
> to be pretty confident the box is going to be stable before I spend the time
> doing the final configuration, and actually put it in production.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions on what I could use?
> 
> The box will be hosting our calendar software for 50 customers (initially),
> and hopefully up to 200 before it maxes out.

For the very best burn-in testing for any server, run scripts that test
the service itself.  That way you can know it will stay up, and you can
use the same scripts to adjust load and look for bottlenecks.
Any Web application can be tested by writing some scripts to do it.  I'm
used to using Perl LWP and HTML::Forms.  There's also Mechanize.

I would bet your calendar software is a Web application.  You could use
Ethereal to sniff the network traffic while you did a typical calendar
session, then suck out all the HTTP GET/POSTS and write a Perl script to
do the same things.

Use the script to record delay time for actions.  Figure out how many
requests per second each app user will be making on average and how much
delay the users are likely to accept.  Then you can know how many users
your server will support.
-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org>
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