Best way to stress test a rails web app?

Question

Are there any good (preferably free) tools out there?

Can they give accurate estimates that reflect production results when the app goes live?

Stress test usually means testing the whole stack of software that delivers the information and is not necessarily bounded to a language. Another term would be performance testing. And You may also want to try functional web testing tools to test the most paths. Want you want is quite large. — Loki, Nov 23 '08 at 00:06

score 10 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:54

I would personally go with Apache Bench http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html

It's free, straight forward to use and lightweight.

If you are looking for a something a little more robust then I think Apache JMeter might be worth looking at. http://jmeter.apache.org/. Again, it's free, a bit of a learning curve and has a GUI so a little heavier.

You might also want to take a look at this Q/A Performing a Stress Test on Web Application?

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 22 '08 at 23:59

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WebLoad is open source:

http://www.webload.org/

answered Nov 22 '08 at 23:59

BobbyShaftoe

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After a Google search for Webload, I came upon this site: http://www.radview.com. They charge you a license fee and I couldn't find the open source link. – Pablo Marambio Aug 07 '12 at 19:11
Yeah, not only is it not open source it's very expensive – Hut8 Oct 13 '13 at 19:46

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 23 '08 at 01:04

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There's a good summary of tools here.

answered Nov 23 '08 at 01:04

digitalsanctum

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Oh man, but that stock photo on the link is awful! – Jarrod Dixon Nov 23 '08 at 04:30
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i just checked it again and man...it seeed they never changed their design since 2004 but they're still updating it! there's a google +1 widget at the bottom @_@ – corroded Sep 28 '11 at 04:24
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that abomination is still there! – IKA May 11 '13 at 12:29

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 29 '12 at 00:33

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Rails comes with performance testing built in: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/performance_testing.html

answered Jun 29 '12 at 00:33

user456584

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Anyone swear by this over other API's? – Trip Jan 11 '14 at 10:23
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This is not part of rails anymore, andwas moved to [rails-perftest gem](https://rubygems.org/gems/rails-perftest). – user3033467 Feb 14 '20 at 09:31

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 23 '08 at 01:09

This is definitely not a free solution, but webmetrics will get the job done. (As well as any website monitoring company in general). They give thorough reports on your web site's performance, and when you schedule load tests you can specify how much load you want to simulate (e.g. simulate 2000 users using my site at once).

I don't think it will break it down and tell you your CPU usage and such, as they stress your website from their servers.

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Dec 22 '09 at 05:41

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You can try Trample, it is load simulation tool here

answered Dec 22 '09 at 05:41

Seyhun Akyürek

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looks like trample is now at http://github.com/jamesgolick/trample I've also heard of http://github.com/dbrady/tourbus and of course jmeter. – rogerdpack Jun 22 '10 at 20:13

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 20 '12 at 07:55

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If you want to visualize performance instead of just look at the numbers you might try Engulf. It's Open Source Software, distributed, and high-performance. http://engulf-project.org/#usage Disclaimer: It's a project I work on.

answered Dec 20 '12 at 07:55

Andrew Cholakian

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Best way to stress test a rails web app?

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