Kevin Kalupson: Getting ready for prime time with Funkload

Synopsis for a lightening talk at Plone Symposium East 2009.

Preparing to launch a Plone site?

You have gone through your check list.

1. Architecture - check
2. Validation - check
3. Unit Tests - check
4. Load Tests - che...whaaaaaaat?

All parts of a site launch are important. Load Testing seems to be one that is often overlooked.

Maybe you didn't completely miss the load tests, but ran something like ab(apache bench mark) to test your site. There is more to load testing than hitting your site hard with some concurrency. Plone is dynamic, so your test should be dynamic.

FunkLoad is a python package for load testing that has Zope in mind. It's quite full featured and has a several features and utilities to make dynamic load tests possible. If installed completely, it even has pretty graphs that will allow your PHB to show off the hard work that your group has done to make the launch a real success.

This talk will address the different varieties of load tests that should be performed on a site, why they should be performed, and what sorts of bugs they can uncover. The audience is anyone involved in a site launch.