Tag: siege

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Sitemap Indexes now supported on MageSpeedTest.com

Long time, no post. Sorry about that. I’ve been very busy working on an app for aggregating ecommerce orders on your mobile device. Check out the sneak peek from twitter. I’m also looking for some private beta testers so if you’re keen to try it out and willing to give us some helpful feedback, flick me an email.

Anyway this is just a quick update on some features (arguably fixes) I added tonight for MageSpeedTest.com. The first is support for multiple sitemap files in a sitemap.xml index file. The second is support for gzipped sitemap files (but only if they are references in the sitemap index).

I have also implemented a couple of measures to prevent the number of links getting out of hand. Firstly for very large sitemaps once I have 10000 links for a single site, I stop collecting them. Secondly if a site does have over 10000 links, I cache them instead of fetching them on each and every speed test.

This caching has been implemented to preserve system resources, now that the servers are monitoring and testing hosts regularly there’s a decent amount going on and I don’t want the test performance to suffer due to downloading millions of URLs from sitemaps unnecessarily.

There are still some outstanding issues with MageSpeedTest.com – if you have emailed me about them be assured I will get to them!

Stay tuned for some posts on my experiences developing the mobile web app, using jQuery mobile and Google App engine.

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Laying Siege to Magento: Performance testing your Magento webstores

As I alluded to in my excuses for not posting in ages blog post the other day I am working on a new Magento hosting review for a company called MageMojo. In doing so I’m trying out the performance testing tool called Siege. Siege was mentioned several times at the Magento Developers Paradise, so I have been wanting to try it ever since.

This is a little article that summarizes the steps I took to do the testing, in case you want to test your own Magento stores.

Update: I have since created a tool that will allow you to run testing like this from the comfort of your own web browser. Check out the automated Magento performance testing at MageSpeedTest.com.

Get a Server

Being all the way over in New Zealand pretty much means performance testing Magento from here is out of the question. I fired up an Amazon EC2 small instance for the purposes of testing for a few hours, 20c – I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again, commodity computing is the future . I won’t bore you with a tutorial on starting an EC2 server, there are enough perfectly good guides already online.

You could optionally use a server you already have, or run this from your own computer at the office or home. It would arguably be a fairer test of latency, not running the tests in a production data centre!

Definitely do not run it from the server that is running Magento, that would be a poor test; a) because there would be no latency and b) because the server would be using resources to run the tests, and serve the webstore, that’s not very fair on it!

Install Siege

wget http://www.joedog.org/pub/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz
 
tar xvzf siege-latest.tar.gz
 
cd siege-2.71/
 
# if you're on a fresh ubuntu, get this package first
sudo apt-get install build-essential
 
./configure
 
make && sudo make install

Now you can begin a siege on your store, but first, an important warning…
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