Smoke Testing
A good starting point is to verify that the site is actually
delivering content and to measure how fast it does this over time. You
can do this by repeatedly accessing the site using the
wget
command and
-
Observing the effect on operating system resources using commands such as
top
,vmstat
andiotop
-
Observing how the Content Store responds using the performance summary pages in the
escenic-admin
web application (see Performance Summary)
wget
downloads a requested page with all its linked
resources, such as images, style sheets and Javascript files. You
should always call it several times when you are testing, in order to
even out variations in performance. The time taken to respond to a
single request cannot be trusted, since it may have arrived at an
exceptionally good or bad point in time: when the caches are being
filled up, when the connection to the database needs to be
re-established or when Java is performing garbage collection. You
should therefore submit the command in a loop that executes it a
number of times, for example:
$
for i in $(seq 10); do
time \
wget -p \
--delete-after \
-o /dev/null \
http://mysite.com/
done
You should repeat this test at intervals to see the effect of the changes you make during tuning.
This command can also be used to fill up the front end caches after they have been flushed (for instance after a new deployment of your portal software).