Load testing consumer websites

I am looking to load test a consumer website. I have tried using JMeter. However, in that case, all the requests originate from one machine. What I really want is to simulate real users across the country some on low speed dialup connections and others on highspeed.

What are the best practices to开发者_Go百科 follow in such a scenario?

---

JMeter supports distributed testing - so if you're already comfortable with it as a tool, you can use it to power these distributed requests from an arbitrary number of machines, too.

Note that all machines run the exact same test plan, so either your plan should have some random selection of fast/slow environments, or you may be able to select which profile to use based on some system properties.

---

You might want to consider using a 3rd party service such as Load Impact.

---

You've expressed two different but related concerns - traffic coming from a single machine and simulating various end-user network speeds.

Why is the first one a concern for your testing? Unless you have a load balancer that uses the IP address as part of its load-distributing algorithm, the vast majority of servers (and application platforms) don't care that all the traffic is coming from a single machine (or IP address). Note also that you can configure the OS of your load generator for multiple IP addresses and the better load-testing tools will make use of those IP addresses so that traffic comes from all of them.

For the simulation of end-user network speeds, again, the better load-testing tools will do this for you. That can give you a pretty good feel for how the bandwidth will affect the page load time, without actually using distributed load generation. But tools frequently do not account for latency. That is where there is no substitute for distributing your load generation.

You can do distributed testing with JMeter, though it can be a bit cumbersome. How many locations do you need? Without knowing more about what you need, my first suggestion would be to choose a tool that has features designed specifically to do what you need. I will pimp our product, Web Performance Load Tester, but there are certainly other options. Load Tester can emulate various end-user connection speeds and has built-in support for generating load from Amazon EC2 (US east and west coast and Dublin, IR...support for Asia coming soon). Once you set up an EC2 account, you can be running your first test from the cloud in 10 minutes.