Who is online load, trying to stress my vB site

[Abomination]

In vboptions -> vboptions -> who's online there is a time setting for updating the who is online. Ours is now set to 60 seconds. When people are viewing the actual page where it lists the people online, there is the odd characteristic of always showing people logged on i.e. leave that page open, walk away, and hours later whoever is viewing that page will still be shown online.

I want to stress test my vB hosting account to see how many people can be supported. I've looked at webhostingtalk.com and they mention the AB apache command but I'm unclear if that would test the in/out going connections to the account

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html

I looked around and found some DDoS software, notbly something called 'smurf' and that appears to only hammer an ip.

If I set the refresh rate for the whos online page to 1 second, and had a bunch of people leave that page open, would that mean anything as to how the vB hosting account could be stressed?

What I mean is, if there are 100 people with that page open, and it was being refreshed every second, couldn't I look at the loads via the cPanel?
100 people online being refreshed every second = Load X
100 people online being refreshed every 2 seconds = Load Y


Or is this a really really dumb idea?

Maybe this thread should be in the server area, let me know.

[Abomination]

I suppose the next question would be, how does the refreshing people online compare to something like clicking the 'new posts' button, which is a database search I believe.

I'm fairly new to all of this.

[Wayne Luke]

Who's Online isn't a very stressful application test. It gets its data out of a couple of tables and only reads data. It doesn't write data except for the session of the user reloading the page. Since session data is stored in RAM memory, it bypasses the largest bottleneck which is I/O.

Posting large formatted messages in rapid succession and searching will be the most intensive things you can do. Posting has to update some of the largest tables in the system as well as parse all that BBCode into HTML. Searching also touches some of the largest tables and usually has to sort through and discard massive arrays to present the data to the user. Searching also updates the caching.

If you put your forums into debug mode, you would be able to see the queries and other things run while a page is built. You would also be able to click on the number of queries to see what does the most work. The best way to track each individual page is to keep a binary log of all your MySQL queries. You can also keep a slow log so any slow query will be recorded and you can have it fixed.

[Abomination]

Would a simple 'new posts' button click add any significant load? Or does it have to be an actual search for an item?

If I wanted to automate this do you have any suggestions what to look for in google? "Auto clicking"? "Memorize mouse clicks"?


It sounds like part of my theory was correct, activity on a forum does add load which should be able to be viewed in the cPanel.

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond.

[Abomination]

If this firefox add on could be set to refresh every second, and I was viewing a large thread with no off site hosted pictures, or possibly the 'New Posts' page, would that put a load on the database?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115

Maybe I could have many tabs/windows open doing that on my home pc?

[Abomination]

I downloaded this add on for firefox, iMacros. It works fantastic and records all sorts of things and can be set to loop.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3863

I created a macro to search for:
Bananas
Apples
Oranges

Then looped 100 times, then opened up 9 more firefox windows and had all 10 doing that. But the results keep coming back 'generated 36 minutes ago' so my wild guess would be that adds no load at all if there is no changes in search results. And as I recall when there are no new posts on a forum there is a similar message about 'generated ___ minutes ago'. My hunch is the programmers put in a bit of logic to save some processor time.

Al of that is confirmed in my cPanel, no added load.

I'll set the macros up to actually make a post and repeat the test. This should be interesting.

edit - now the duplicate message and flood checks are slowing me down. I'll disable for the time being.

[Abomination]

I set the minimum time between posts from 30 seconds to 0.
I edited the "includes/functions_newpost.php" file from this:
if ($prevpostfound), to this:
if (0) // if ($prevpostfound)

So I could make identical posts as fast as possible.

I downloaded the Imacros for fire fox, and recorded a macro.

The current macro is posting a new post with many many smilies, then repeat. With 10 windows open, and the macro looping 30 times each, there does not seem to be any performance degradation. The site seems to react quite fast and the cpanel shows no perceptible load increase. Best guess would be 60 - 120 posts per minute are being made, I'll time that next time.


I'll look into putting the site into debug mode and setting up log options.