Stress testing software

Question

Having a high spec machine to develop on is a real plus for productivity, but what software tools, techniques or strategies do you use to constrain your environment to test what happens in low memory, processor cycles or even network bandwidth?

Answer 1

For stress testing web apps you can simulate load with load testing tools like JMeter

Answer 2

I would set up really low spec virtual machines for testing.

You can also stress test things like MySQL and individual parts of your stack, but you would need to list what specific things you want to stress.

Answer 3

I think all you can simple simulate:

• For Low Memory write some application who allocate all memory.
• For Processor, you can run some game.
• For Network you can run some torrent downloading.

I don't know about this software exists.

Answer 4

Besides simulating the environment, I would also stress the application by supplying loads of input, like artificial events, huge erroneous data or ultra stupid user actions :) Because these affects can also make the system resume more and more cpu, and may show you unexpected behaviour like unreleased resources, simultaneous instances (if the requirement is keeping just one running instance), etc...

Answer 5

Have you considered using LoadRunner? When I worked on Government projects, we used LoadRunner to baseline builds and determine their performance. It works really well.