[LRUG] e-petitions site

[Paul Robinson]

On 5 Aug 2011, at 09:47, Mickael Riga wrote:

> Well, the simple use of `ab` utility already gives a lot of informations.


That's quite a naive testing tool, and I'd argue it's not suitable for proper load testing. 

It lets you hammer one single URL over and over again, which isn't the same as monitoring a large crowd of people going to the site and clicking on things which will have a completely different load profile.

Other tools are more suitable for better understanding real world loading issues by allowing the creation of fictitious users navigating through the site much like real users will. 

ab is fine if you basically want to check how fast your server can throw a static index page at you. It's also a great way to see if changes you've made to your webserver config have made it any faster/slower at responding to requests. It can also be used to test different web server middleware for performance - Zeus Technologies were the guys who wrote it, IIRC, to show their threaded model was better than Apache's original fork'ing model. 

It will not, however, tell you if your site will fall over or stay up under heavy use of people moving around causing different controller methods to be called.


> Anyway it will always be harder to build a high volume website in Ruby and especially in Ruby on Rails.


[citation needed] :-)

I don't want to turn this into a "Ruby is slow" vs "No it isn't" flamewar, but I have yet to see any substantial evidence that it is impossible to build a high-traffic website in Rails. In fact, high-traffic Rails websites are clearly in evidence.

Many people still seem to have limited knowledge of caching and other web acceleration techniques, plus don't seem to understand that Rails' MVC architecture allows for easy/trivial expansion at the tiers which need the most help. Tier expansion can be painful in non-MVC architectures and I doubt most PHP programmers would know what you were talking about if you were to suggest it to them.

If asked to make a Rails site scale to say 4 million users/hour, I'd feel more confident it could be done - and more elegantly - than with a PHP site written without any framework, or an ASP.NET site.

There is no reason why a moderate server with a little bit of careful configuration shouldn't be able to handle 1000 requests/minute. I'm curious to know what happened. It might just be "one of those things".

Paul