Ask HN: Are there any tests I can run on a network to simulate 100 heavy users? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there any tests I can run on a network to simulate 100 heavy users?

14 pointsmarcamillion6 comments

I will be hosting a Ruby on Rails workshop at a small hotel in the near future, and while they have 'Wifi' everywhere on the property, and the property normally hosts 150 - 300 people, I am not 100% confident that they have hosted 150 tech people that tend to have heavy web surfing habits/needs.

Their tech department is also 1 or 2 guys.

Are there any automated tests I can download and run from my laptop, on the network, that would simulate 100 'heavy users' on the network at the same time?

Their broadband pipe is a 15mbps cable connection. Would that suffice for the general surfing needs of 100 - 150 techies? I know all it takes is 1 or 2 bit torrenters to kill the entire network, but assuming we can at the very least block those ports or encourage the attendees not to file share on the network, would that speed suffice for general surfing needs?

What are good resources online that would allow me to quickly get up to speed on the IT related issues, so that I can ask their sysadmins the right questions?

Edit: Note that I am fairly technical, so assume I can get up to speed quickly even with technical manuals, etc.

There were recently some threads about problems with wifi at conferences. They might be useful:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870554

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870489

Tsung could be a good option: http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/

It is a very technical tool, and it sure could use a bit more documentation for getting started, but it does what you're asking for.

You can set it up to run as a proxie and connect a browser. Then you record various sessions of typical browsing of the site you want to test and Tsung will save them in an xml format.

Based on these xml sessions you then setup a test plan for Tsung where you can define phases. The idea is to make the phases increasingly tough on the site with more and more users arriving per second.

Once you have the test plan you let Tsung loose on your servers and you will get some nice graphs and reports. If you made the later phases brutal enough you should get to see at what point the increasing traffic makes your site die and you will know wether that point is something that could realistically be reached during normal use...

Hrmm....this solution sounds good from the point of view from a site owner. i.e. handling a spike in traffic to my site and trying to plan accordingly.

However, the issue I am having is trying to manage the IT infrastructure to handle 150 people joining the WiFi network at the exact same time. I am trying to setup the wifi network so that it can withstand such an onslaught without crashing.

Check out this Joel on Software post. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/08.html

Be sure to note the Server Fault link it links to as well http://serverfault.com/questions/72767/why-is-internet-acces...

http://www.solarwinds.com/products/toolsets/WANKiller.aspx WanKiller is a pretty capable tool.

Can do you 1 million

http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/sandia-co...

They use that to model Botnets etc.

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