How to test the performance of an http JSON server?

Question

How to test the performance of an http server that serves and accepts only JSON requests (post and get)? I'm new to web testing, so tell me if I'm trying to do it in incorrect way.

I want to test if:

• server is capable of handling hundreds of simultaneous connections.
• server is capable to serve thousands requests per second.
• server does not crash or get stuck when the number of requests exceeds server capabilities, and continues to run normally when the number of requests drops below average.

One way is to write some logic that repeats certain actions per run, and run multiple of them.

PS: Ideally, the tool/method should support compression like gzip as an option.

Answer 1

You can try JMeter and it's HTTPSampler. About gzip. I've never used it in JMeter, but it seems it can: How to get JMeter to request gzipped content?

Answer 2

If you are new to web testing then there are a lot of factors that you need to take into account. At the most basic level you want to do the things you have outlined.

Beyond this you need to think about how poorly performing clients might impact your service eg. keeping connections alive, sending malformed requests etc. These may translate into exceptions on the server which might in turn have additional impact (due to logging or slower execution). This means that you have to think of ways to break the service and monitor events that have an impact at higher scales.

Microsoft have a fairly good introduction to performance testing for web applications.

Answer 3

Apache Bench (ab) is a command line tool that's great for these kinds of things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ApacheBench

ab -n 100 -c 10 http://www.yahoo.com/