How do I stress test a website?

Question

How do I stress test a website by logging in 200+ accounts at the same time? Basically I have my website deployed on AWS and I would like to make sure that it will be able to handle 200+ users load on that day. I understand I can enable automatic scaling but I would like to know if it's possible for one instance to handle it.

Answer 1

Perform a load-test on the website:

• Write a load-test script
• Ramp-up users from 1 to 200
• Let them click around the website with the script
• Monitor
  • Response times
  • Error on backend and frontend
  • CPU/Memory/Disk usage

If the response times stays the same for all users, or at-least comfortably low, it probably will be fine.

If your script doesn't have a wait time between actions and you keep hammering the website continuously it could be that 200 concurrent users represent 2000 actual users or more, because real users click then read and then after some seconds click again.

Some common tools to load-test with:

• https://jmeter.apache.org/ (Java)
• https://artillery.io/ (JavaScript, used for API load testing)

Do also read the AWS Testing Policy to prevent your account to get blocked for abuse.