ITX8080

General Information

Schedule

Lecture TH 17:45 - 21:15 (odd weeks)

Practice TH 17:45 - 21:15 (even weeks)

Communication

Discussinons will be held at course forum in Moodle.

https://moodle.e-ope.ee/course/view.php?id=4319

All scenario proposals must be posted to their own respective forums.

Please register your account today at http://moodle.e-ope.ee

The lecturers can be reached via the course coordinator:

antti.andreimann only-people-please eesti.ee

Grading

Best of the bunch will score points.

Points will be awareded for the:

• Best simulation proposal
• Best result obtained in the lab environment
• Best lab report

In total it is possible to score three points for every two weeks.

Maximum score is 3, nobody will be awareded more.

Minimum score to pass is 1.

For those who can not score a single point, an examination proposals will received from those of you who scored 3 and voted.

Points scored so far

Margus - 3pts (lecture 1 vote, lab 2 testing method, lab 3 result)

Andres - 1pts (best lab 1 report)

Michal - 1pts (best lab 1 result)

Alexandre - 1pts (best lab 2 result)

Roman - 1pts (best lab 2 report)

Allan - 3pts (best lab 3 proposal with Predrag, lucky SOB scenario 4 proposal, best scenario 5 proposal)

Predrag - 2pts (best lab 3 proposal with Allan, best scenario 5 proposal)

Mauno P - 3pts (best lab 3 report, best lab 4 report, best scenario 7 proposal)

Robert P - 3 pts (best scenario 4 proposal, best lab 4 result, best lab 5 result)

Anis - 1 pts (best lab 4 result)

Mart - 1 pts (best lab 5 report)

Ronny - 1 pts (best lab 7 report)

Mikheil - 1 pts (best lab 6 report)

Jan - 1pts (best lab 8 result)

Franck - 1pts (best lab 8 report)

Scenarios

Scenario 1

There is a Wordpress based blog.

The client is worried: How many visitors can they handle before they die.

Establish a baseline: How many page displays per second AT LEAST we can handle. Disruption of the site operation is NOT acceptable.

Minimal budget!

Assume upstream bandwidth can cope...

Be as detailed and technical as You possibly can.

Proposals

• Install a similar system on test hardware
  • Test hardware is smaller than
• Extrapolate from current system logs
  • Must have some load ...
  • It may NOT be linear (it usually isn't!)
• Generate some load (without breaking it) and extrapolate from logs
• Find existing performance graphs for wordpress ... (highly unlikely)

Simulation environment

• Real hardware
• Virtualization platform

Pick what is closer to the real system.

Benchmarking tools

• httpPerf
• pagetop
• htop
• AB - apache bench
• curl / wget + custom scripts
• JMeter
• Grinder
• wpscan - wordpress specific

How to separate benchmark tools from the server?

• Use to VMs, Use CPU allocation in virtualization environment to allocate different CPUs for different VMs
• Put VM disk images on different disks (probably an overkill)?
• Monitor process table and make sure that test tools consume significantly less than web server processes. Lower the priority of the test tools.
• Start monitoring load and page views. Generate some load on real system. How?

How do we define the system is dead?

Page view takes longer than 10sec.

Determining if referenced content has an effect on results

• Make a list of all references the main page has
• Measure the performance of all the URLs
• Disregard the ones that load at least two magnitudes faster.

How to measure the results?

• Measure response times and number of parallel requests using the benchmarking tool itself
• Deduct the numbers from server logs
• Put the system under load, test with a normal browser if the load time is reasonable.

What to document?

• Exact configuration of the benchmarking tool (command line, scripts, config files etc. for EACH test performed)
• The version of the benchmarking tool used
• Virtualization platform
• Hardware specification
• URL of the page tested
• Wordpress configuration
• Wordpress content !!!
• Wordpress version
• Web server configuration
• Web server version (apache, php, sql, etc)
• The measurement results (page load times under each different test)
• Web browser used to measure response time (type, version, operating system)
• Operating system configuration (version, software installed, customizations etc).
• The AUTHOR! and the DATE!

Write evertyhing down at ONCE. if using VM-s save the image.

Lab1

• Virtualization platform: VirtualBox
  • 512M memory, 1 CPU for each VM
• Wordpress 3.2.1 with default settings (no extra plugins, no performance tweaks, default skin) and default home page
• Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS 32bit
• Web server: Apache2, SQL: MySQL (default versions bundled with OS)
• Point will go to the person that can produce the most dense graph showing the number of concurrent connections against the response time. Individual tests used to plot the data must be repeated at least 3 times.

You will need to create two different virtual machines, one is going to be the wordpress server and the 2nd one is the client which is used to attack the server.

To be able to connect between the two virtual machines, You need to add an additional network adapter to both hosts. It can be either "Host Only" or "Internal" type.

To enable the new adapters in Ubuntu edit the file: /etc/network/interfaces