Getting back to load testing

I actually got to do some load testing today! Heck, I needed to figure out how many combinations for a test and even got to whip out some discrete math! Woooooo! Look at me go!

One of the things that I like about load testing is the "WTF?" factor. Finding those things that could never be found in "onesie-twosie" testing. In my current testing I am using JMeter to chunk 1500 e-mails and FTPs through a file routing system and I found that after the xfer is done that the w3wp.exe process would go high, spike a processor and the large object heap of the w3wp would go high. On top of that, during the same period where the w3wp goes whizzing off into la-la land the private byte usage of SQL Server climbs into the exosphere. We don't know what the problem is just yet but I like weeding stuff like that out with the initial raise of the eyebrow and a muffled "WTF?" Something tells me that I'll be brushing off my memory dump skills and using Son of Strike to figure out what is being dumped into the LOH.

I've been looking at load balancers and in my Google journeys I came across HAProxy and it seems to be quite a piece of art and an industrial load balancing solution. It runs natively under Linux but there is a FreeBSD version out in the ports tree. I haven't done anything with it yet as I've been busy with other tasks but I want to give it a test drive. It should be well more than what we need for the task at hand. 9 GB/s throughput? Yeah. We're never gonna see that. :-)

http://haproxy.1wt.eu/