As far as I can remember, we never talked about Load Impact and, to be honest, I can’t recall ever seeing this excellent resource… until now. Since I happened to bump into such a useful tool, I thought you also have to know a few things about it, because every site owner or Web developer working on a site dream about huge amounts of traffic, but I am also sure they have nightmares about too much of it! 😉
More than just a website testing tool, Load Impact is a whole package of tools, with a pretty solid set of them freely available. The main test, available right from the home page of the site, allows you to test how well the server hosting your site can handle large amounts of traffic. After all, it’s better to find this way that 10k visitors in 15 minutes can kill your server, instead of doing it the hard way… Just think about the frustration of finally making it to Digg’s front page and seeing your server “go down in flames” 3 minutes later!
My final hint for you is this – check the Page Analyzer section, there are plenty of goodies to be had for free there, including emulation of most popular browsers for page loading tests, without leaving Chrome 1/2/3/4 or Safari 3/4 and other smaller players aside. Sweet! 😉
Oh, yeah – you can only simulate the activity of up to 50 concurrent users on your site for free, but if you pay… you can break all the limits! It only remains to be seen if your server can do that, too…
