On Jul 7, 2009, at 12:57 PM, Wayne Johnson wrote: > We have a need to stress test our product. We have a few multi core > machines to run as a DB server and App server but they are pretty > heavily used and hiding under a desk. > > Now the question. Would it be reasonable to try and run stress > testing on EC2 (or other) farms? Since we only will need them > occasionally, but beat them to death when we do? Would it be cost > effective to run this on a farm? If there is no control over how > much memory bandwidth you get, you may not be able to get a > consistent load. Is there a similar issue with disk I/O? > > I guess it all depends on what you are really testing for, and if the differences between testing it on EC2 and it's actual use case really matter or can be factored out. Id be fairly reluctant to think I could get meaningful results for anything approaching actual use cases. Like for instance, what does our application do when 400 people log in might be completely different between EC2 and real deployments....and the kicker is, no matter what it does in testing, you aren't really going to to know what it does in production until you accurately simulate production. There are other sorts of things that you might find with EC2 though, where deploying on real hardware will be overkill. Like for instance how much CPU time does our forking model consume on 8 way hardware with 40 simultanious transactions going on. Thanks, Josh Paetzel -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090707/a77a904e/attachment-0001.htm