Torture.pl Home Page

These are companion pages for an article I wrote for the June 1999 issue of Web Techniques Magazine. The article describes a simple Perl program that can be used to torture-test your Web site, slowly increasing its load until it breaks under the strain.

Installation

The current incarnation of the script requires Perl 5.004 or higher, and the Time::HiRes module, available at CPAN. It uses the fork() call to spawn multiple copies of itself so that it may simulate multiple users. Unfortunately this means that the script will only run on Unix ports of Perl. A multithreaded version that works on Windows systems is not yet complete (volunteers, anyone)?

To install, simply unpack the file, make the script executable, and move it into your favorite directory for executables. You may have to change the top line from #!/usr/local/bin/perl to the actual location of your Perl interpreter, such as #!/usr/bin/perl. This can be done with any text editor.

Follow the examples in the article to test drive the script.

Support

This script, like many of the other scripts that I have written, is intended as an example on which you can build. I make no guarantees as to its performance, Y2K compliance, or suitability for any purpose. If the script seems broken and you are absolutely desperate to get it to work, feel free to e-mail me. I'm also happy to accept patches or your own enhancements. Please do not contact me for feature requests or minor nits.

Stein Lab Home Page

Lincoln D. Stein, lstein@cshl.org
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Last modified: Tue Jun 8 14:22:47 EDT 1999