{"id":152727,"date":"2016-03-15T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/premium.wpmudev.org\/blog\/?p=152727"},"modified":"2017-06-27T02:06:43","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T02:06:43","slug":"stress-testing-wordpress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/stress-testing-wordpress\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Stress Test Your WordPress Site for Traffic Surges"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s important to know just how well your WordPress website can handle large amounts of traffic in the event you get a sudden traffic spike. With Tsung, you can stress test your site for free, see your server’s limits first-hand, and use the data to create a plan to scale your site.<\/p>\n

Tsung (formerly IDX-Tsunami)<\/a> is an open source distributed load testing tool that works on most servers and can stress test many platforms, including HTTP and MySQL. You can run it via SSH and it simulates a sudden amount of high traffic being sent to your site from a single machine, although, you can also create clusters.<\/p>\n

Tsung is developed in Erlang<\/a> and even though it is used to stress test your site, the actual processes it sends are lightweight so you can see how much your site can handle without breaking it or crashing Tsung.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the official documentation for Tsung isn’t completely up-to-date, so in this post I’ll show you how to install Tsung using Wget<\/a>. I’ll also walk you through how to generate reports for each test you run so you can analyze the data that Tsung generates after a successful load test.<\/p>\n

What is Tsung?<\/h3>\n

The development of a distributed\u00a0load stress test tool began in 2001 by Nicolas Niclausse, but it was meant\u00a0to be used internally by\u00a0IDEALX (now OpenTrust) and it wasn’t until several months later that it evolved into an open source project.<\/p>\n

Tsung simulates real users on a server and can stress test many platforms, including HTTP, WebDAV, SOAP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, LDAP and Jabber \/ XMPP servers.<\/p>\n

It can be used to test your site and send high load tests from 12,000 to 10 million simultaneous users.<\/p>\n

\"A
Graph reports can be generated from Tsung.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In fact, these numbers weren’t just pulled out of nowhere\u00a0\u2013 it has been successfully used this way in the past.<\/p>\n

Tsung is now an industrial-strength tool that has been used by many high profile companies and institutions\u00a0including Oracle, for its Moodle software platform<\/a>, and the French Finance Ministry (Direction G\u00e9n\u00e9rale des Imp\u00f4ts<\/em> or DGI).<\/p>\n

You can run the tool through SSH on clients such as Terminal for Mac OS X or PuTTY for Windows<\/a>. Fire up your favorite SSH client to get started right away.<\/p>\n

Server Requirements<\/h3>\n

There are a few requirements needed in order to run Tsung so it’s important that they’re installed and taken care of first. Tsung can be installed on\u00a0Linux, Solaris, BSD, Win32 and Mac OS X servers and you need to have root access to your server in order to install and run Tsung.<\/p>\n

You can use sudo<\/a> to run commands as the root user and you can check out the official documentation for these options to reference their installation:<\/p>\n