[Zope] torture.pl for performance testing

Karl Fast fast@lights.com
Tue, 22 Jun 1999 22:20:04 -0600 (CST)


Just catching up with the last weeks worth of messages and saw the
discussion about zope performance, and thought I would point people to
torture.pl.

Lincoln Stein (the guy who wrote CGI.pm) has written a perl script for
torture testing web servers. The July issue of Web Techniques has an
article, written by Stein, about the script on page 67. Simple and useful.

The code and the text of the article can be found online here:

http://stein.cshl.org/~lstein/torture/


Here's the first few paragraphs of the article:

This script has two functions. First, it can be used to test the speed and
responsiveness of a Web server. Second, the script can be used to test the
stability and reliability of a particular Web server.

When used for performance testing, you can measure the speed and response
time of your Web servers, CGI scripts, and other Web enhancements.
Although torture.pl isn't rigorously normalized for cross-server
comparisons the way the WebStone metric is, it's good for measuring
changes on a single Web server.

When used in torture-testing mode, torture.pl sends large amounts of
random data to a server, trying to make it crash. If a server, CGI script,
module, or template processor can't handle large amounts of random data,
then it's not particularly well written and might even contain security
holes.

_______________________________________________________________
karl fast                                       fast@lights.com