Stress Testing Your Website

Introduction

So you have built a cool web site with code you wrote or downloaded from great sites like CodeProject, the next thing you might want to do is testing it: Can your code handle more than, say 10 concurrent users?  Does it have a memory leak that will eventually lead to crash if you don't reboot?

Using Java For Stress Testing

Here is a simple java program I wrote that can query a web site continuously.  If you want to simulate more than one user, just start as many instances of this program as you need.  The command line to run it is:

java XYWebTest the_web_page number_of_milliseconds

The second parameter, number_of_milliseconds, is used to determine a random time interval to sleep/pause between two requests. For example, the following command

java XYWebTest "http://www.yahoo.com/"  20000

will query the www.yahoo.com site continuously, sleeping a random amount of time from 0 up to 20000 milliseconds between consecutive requests.

If you omit the second parameter, the default number 10000 will be used. If you put the following commands in a batch file and save it in the same directory as the class file, then you will be able to run multiple instances of this program by double clicking the batch file:

set ClassPath=.
start java XYWebTest "www.somesite.com" 60000
start java XYWebTest "www.somesite.com" 60000
start java XYWebTest "www.somesite.com" 60000
start java XYWebTest "www.somesite.com" 60000
start java XYWebTest "www.somesite.com" 60000

The java code is simple. You can use or modify it freely. I don't pretend to be an expert in this field, I am sure if you look around, you can find some other code or tools that do exactly the same thing.

Disclaimer: You are supposed to test only your own web site with this code.  I am not responsible for anything you do.  By the way, the code won't work if you need to go through a proxy server to access web sites outside your company firewall.

Please visit my home page for my other articles and software tools.  Thank you.

The Code

//************** XYWebTest.java *********************** 

import java.net.*; 
import java.io.*; 
import java.util.*; 

public class XYWebTest 
{ 
  public static void main (String[] args) 
  { 
    // initialize random seed 
    Random randomGen = new Random(new Date().getTime()); 
    while(true) 
    { 
      try 
      { 
        // sleep for a random interval 
        Thread.currentThread().sleep(
          randomGen.nextInt(args.length>1?
          (new Integer(args[1]).intValue
          ()):10000)); 
        if(args.length>0) 
        { 
          // print the user supplied URL
          // to the console window 
          System.out.println(args[0]); 
          // open URL connection 
          URLConnection urlConn =
            new URL(args[0]).openConnection(); 
          urlConn.setUseCaches(false); 
          // read and print the content
          // to the console window 
          InputStream in = urlConn.getInputStream(); 
          byte buf[] = new byte[4096]; 
          int nSize = in.read(buf); 
          while(nSize>=0) 
          { 
            System.out.print(new String(buf,0,nSize)); 
            nSize = in.read(buf); 
          } 
          System.out.print("\r\n"); 
        } 
        else return; 
      } 
      catch(Exception e) 
      { 
        // print error message 
        System.out.println("Exception: "+e.getMessage()); 
      } 
    } 
  } 
} 

//******************* end ******************************** 

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