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…
Continue reading Laying Siege to Magento: Performance testing your Magento webstores