Forum Moderators: mack
I'm currently carrying out a project for univeristy where i'm comparing the performance of two web applications; one built in PHP, one in ASP. I've managed to uncover a fair bit of material on performance/load testing but still have a few unanswered questions. When setting up a test, is it normal practice to test on two or more server platforms? Do you also take into account hardware issues such as the hardware architecture of the servers? Also with regards to testing software, i've found a couple of free to use web application test tools, namely Microsofts ACT and another PERL based one. Can anybody recommmend any others that don't require complex scripting?
If anybody here is experienced in this field any additional info on this topic appreciated.
Thanks.
the best way to compare hardware is to completely take it out of the equation by running them on the exact same hardware specs.
the machines themselves should be exactly the same ram, drives, cpu etc. I realize you may have one being IIS and one being Apache but the software differences are to be expected. Preferably fairly basic configurations of both would be best.
We used this one software for load testing to simulate multiple users, built test cases and all that but I can't for the life of me remember what it was called.
For most of my load testing I build the test scripts myself or have someone else in the team do it, I'm better though because if it doesn't break during testing then you did something wrong. I try not to actually burn the server but that's happened before too. Better to find out in dev than on a live site. ;)
