Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Have a big website? Worried about server load ?

If you have a big website, then it happened more that once to see it moving very slow. There is a way to do some testing and find out is the problems are caused by the hardware, or by the website itself.

Have we ever thought how big websites could be configured to handle massive amount of traffic? How thousands of businesses worldwide are facing challenges everyday to make sure there are no connection failures due to heavy load or congestion of traffic at the website.

The answer is straight, every organization will have to monitor and baseline amount of traffic by going for stress test to find out if the current hardware could be supportive enough to handle a specific amount of load. One such great software is the ?Web Application Testing? or WAPT, which is a great utility for any website?s sustainability. This software is load, stress and performance testing tool for web sites and intranet applications with web interface. WAPT is designed for MS Windows 2000/XP/2003 and Windows 98/Me operating systems. The question that should be asked is why should we consider WAPT or why should the organization consider Load or stress testing? We certainly believe, major performance issues would arise if stress test has not been performed. This could very well mean that after the server reaches a certain level of concurrent connection made by visitors, it would consume its hardware resources to process every visitor?s request. If there is a lot to process, the server might give priority to web application than its local resource ending up in a system crash.

Thus, the goal of WAPT is very simple; it helps the organization?s web servers to become active at every stage of stress, whether it?s a web development or website traffic processing power. WAPT can perform a stress test by simulating several thousands of concurrent connections to check the web server/website performance and if it finds any bottlenecks it would warn and suggest fixing this issue by recommending the very next thing.

There are lots of new features added in WAPT 4.0

  • - You can use multiple virtual profiles to test a single scenario
  • - There is support for IP spoofing where each virtual user can run with individual and unique IP address
  • - Each Virtual can be configured with different username and password and is compatible with Windows Integrated Authentication or Basic Configuration.
  • - You can see and configure the type of reports even a test run summary report is generated
  • - There is command line interface available
  • - There is a support for persistent cookies
  • - All the test scenario and profiles are stored in XML format
  • The Main features of WAPT 4.0

  • - You can have the application run and understand multiple languages
  • - There is cool recording feature which you can use to record any configuration and stress test simulations for later review or demonstrations as it supports playback of HTTPS/SSL 2.0 & 3.0 pages. You can also record the user connection speed using the keep-alive connections to a HTTP 1.0 or HTTP 1.1 pages or even HTTPS/SSL pages.
  • - You can generate data for run-times on specific scheduled intervals by randomizing the delay between the page hits.
  • - It also has a support for proxy servers for HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4 & 5 and supports cookies as well.
  • - All the authentication request can be handled using NTLM (windows Integrated Authentication) or using the basic authentication.
  • - If you would like to call the website by a different nameFind Article, then you also have the facility to add custom host headers
  • - All this the scenarios can be configured using the user friendly Wizard
  • - You can choose the reports to be either graphical or in plain text along with full virtual server logs
  • A must tool for administrator or other user who would to maintain their website efficiently.

    Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

    Mircea Ionescu writes for CoreDownload, a shareware archive where you can find utilities like WAPT to test your server.

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    Sunday, December 2, 2007

    Dedicated Server vs. Co-location Web Hosting

    by www.vipwh.comSo - you know shared hosting no longer cuts it, and your single office connection is not enough to host a web server - so which is best, leasing a dedicated server or buying your own server and co-locating it someone's data center?

    So - you know shared hosting no longer cuts it, and your single office connection is not enough to host a web server - so which is best, leasing a dedicated server or buying your own server and co-locating it someone's data center?

    So - you know shared hosting no longer cuts it, and your single office connection is not enough to host a web server - so which is best, leasing a dedicated server or buying your own server and co-locating it someone's data center?

    Difference

    For those that are unsure of the difference, here it is in a nutshell. When you co-locate, you are simply renting space within someone else's facility to store your own server or servers. It's like a high tech gym locker that you are renting all or part of to house your servers. You either ship or deliver your server to your provider. Additional services provided with co-location vary from host to host but it certainly won't include the actual server. With a dedicated server you are getting all the features of co-location, plus the actual web server itself.

    Which is better?

    While it certainly depends on your particular needs, and there are excellent situations for both the dedicated server option is quickly becoming a better choice in more and more cases. If you already own a web server, or cluster that you prefer to use, then obviously co-location may be your best choice. If you are considering buying new equipment and shipping it off for co-location - please reconsider. The prices and equipment available in dedicated hosting these days are outstanding plus relieve you of the burden of hardware. Most hosts keep identical spare parts on hand for the types of servers used and are quick to react if something fails. Depending on your arrangement with a colocation deal hardware failure could mean paying to have a server shipped back (or you drive to get it), having it fixed yourself then sending it back to the data center.

    Please refer following web sites for useful resources related to web site hosting:

    http://www.vipwh.com
    http://www.thehostingguide.com

    Paras Shah

    Chief Technology Officer

    VIP PowerNet, Inc.

    Phone: (713)787-6501

    Email: paras@vippowernet.com

    http://www.vippowernet.com

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