How to load test a new Java web application?

Question

Within two months were are going live with a web system coded from scratch. We expect that the current user registration rate (1000/day) will maintain and that the system will present extremely low latency. Though, we do not have the knowledge on how to measure:

• performance bottlenecks in the new code base
• concurrency issues that may arise
• maximum number of concurrent users while maintaining our accepted QoS

Our technology stack is: Spring 3, Hibernate, iBatis, Velocity, Polopoly CMS and Oracle RAC.

Can anyone share his/her experience in load testing a web application? Any pointers to tutorials would also be very much welcome!

Answer 1

We have used Grinder for generating load, open source and free. Load tests are written in jyhton, very flexible.

Then we use YourKit as a profiler to find processing and memory hotspots, and more.

This combination has worked very well for us.