Justin Erenkrantz, University of California, Irvine
Aaron Bannert
Track: Apache Web Server
Date: Tuesday, July 23
Time: 1:45pm - 5:15pm
Location: Sea Breeze I
Welcome to Flood - an open source load tester and a project of the Apache Software Foundation. This interactive tutorial introduces the basic functionality of flood. Flood has the capability of testing dynamic web sites as well as generating large amounts of traffic.
We’ll examine the overall architecture of flood. Flood was written because it was felt that no commercial tool was available to adequately test performance of large, complex, and dynamic websites.
We continue with a brief overview of Flood's XML configuration syntax and will highlight some of the major configuration ideas and philosophies.
We then examine a hypothetical online ordering system, study strategies for testing this site, capture the data with flood, analyze the site's performance via the output of flood, and identify pages that may require further performance evaluation.
We’ll also introduce basic performance analysis techniques both on a operating-system level (such as truss or strace) and those techniques specific to a programming language (such optimization of a JVM).
If time permits, we will showcase performance increases between Apache 1.3 and 2.0 that can be measured by Flood.
