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How do you do Load Testing and Capacity Planning for Web Sites

I want to conduct an online exam in which approximately 200 users will be participating. The server will be held on a local web server. The exam consists of 60 questions which will be answered by the users. I want to know how many requests per second can the server handle if my hardware configuration is 3GB RAM and processor is core i3 first generation. The 60 questions will be multiple choice and the users will select one answer for each of the options provided. If all 200 users submit 60 such answers simultaneously, will my server be able to handle it. I use Apache 2.2.22 on Fedora 16.

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marked as duplicate by MDMarra, ewwhite, Chris S Oct 6 '12 at 17:54


1 Answer 1

This depends entirely on how your back end handles this. Do they just store 60 lines of text per submission in a database? Does it attempt to grade them and provide immediate feedback? How much load does your grading code generate in CPU/RAM usage? Does that load scale linearly? If so, it should be pretty easy to multiple by 200 and have your answer.

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The answers are all one line of text(rather I was thinking of making it just 1 character like 'a', 'b','c' or 'd'). Of course there is a PHP script that writes the user response to a database.... If it is 60 such characters submitted simultaneously by 200 users, then it should be easily handled by the server of the hardware specs that I've mentioned, right? –  Sumit Majumdar Oct 6 '12 at 17:54
How do I know? You're the one with the app. The point I was making was to test this yourself and extrapolate the load for x200. –  MDMarra Oct 6 '12 at 18:00
