Building a load test environment
As you’ve seen, a load test environment simply consists of one or more servers hosting the website being tested, and one or more load generating servers. You could use the same servers for both load generation and site hosting to save on hardware, but that would make it more difficult to determine whether any bottleneck on the machine is caused by the site or by the load generator.
If you have a spare server lying around with the same specs as your production servers, that would be great. You’d use that server for the site, and your development machine(s) to generate load.
However, I’ll assume that you just have your development machine, and maybe one or more additional machines such as laptops, all running Vista or Windows 7.
In the following sections, some options are listed for hosting your test site. After that, we’ll go through some load generation options.
