System Requirements of Webserver Stress Tool
Recommended Hardware and Operating Systems
The preferred operating environment is Windows XP/2000/2003/Vista on a workstation with at least a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, and a fast network connection. The target webservers can be of any operating system.
Test Client Details
Operating System: Although Webserver Stress Tool runs on all 32bit Windows versions (Win95, 98, ME, XP, 2000, NT, 2003) it is strongly recommended to run it on a Windows NT machine or better (i.e. Windows XP, 2000, NT, 2003, Vista) because of limitations in Win9x/ME's IP stack.
Hardware: Serious testing can be conducted with a machine of 1 Ghz and more. More CPU power and multithreading or multiprocessing will be helpful for high traffic scenarios (e.g. when several thousand users are simulated). Try to supply 512 MB of RAM, 1 GB should be enough even for high traffic scenarios. Webserver Stress Tool records the CPU load of the client machine during the test, so you can check after a test whether you need more processing power.
Network: For load tests the network connection between the test client and the server is critical. For the connection between the server and the test client you must provide the full total bandwidth that an equal number of real users would use when accessing your server!
Target Webserver Details
Webserver Stress Tool can test all HTTP servers that are accessible via TCP/IP since nothing has to be installed on the webserver and the connections to the server are using standard HTTP protocol. For example you can use it with the following webserver environments
- Windows IIS
- Apache on Windows or Linux
- HP/UX
- IBM AIX
- Various flavors of Linux