Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Zed and Geoffrey, laying it down, httperf style

I’ve been waiting for this screencast for awhile. Our team at SeekingAlpha has been doing a ton of work with load testing, performance, and optimization, in both Rails and PHP (ugh). I’ve used httperf a bit but still don’t feel like I really “get it”. Its great to see Zed and Geoffrey have combined forces to lay out how to do load testing *right*. Or as Zed says:

…it is probably the first description of performance measurement and analysis I’ve seen that
actually gets it right.

For nine crummy dollars, how can you go wrong? Thats like 1.5 triple venti skim no-whip mochas. Score.

but is httperf any good?

I know of many free and open source tools with much richer capabilities (OpenSTA and JMeter for example).

-Corey

I think httperf is better at what it does - its simple and does one thing really well: load test a single url and provide reliable stats on it. Its also easily scriptable and so can be automated from anywhere with any tool. I don’t know if many of the more complex tools can do that.

cool.. thanks Rob.
I am always looking for new tools to add to my performance/load/stress toolbox. I’ll have to check it out more.

-Corey