Capacity Testing with Grinder

Question

How can I tell grinder to use more and more threads until it reaches a point where the load is unacceptable?

Answer 1

You can ramp in your threads over time, so that as your test progresses, the load increases. See http://grinder.sourceforge.net/g3/script-gallery.html#threadrampup.py

It will be up to you to determine at what point the load level is unacceptable. Grinder Analyzer might be helpful for that.

http://track.sourceforge.net/

Good luck.

Answer 2

One of the advantages of a tool like Grinder, which allows for a coded script, as opposed to Jmeter is that as you are 'ramping up' you can poll the response times and keep increasing until the response time hits a threshold. Other commercial tools have this feature that is 'apply load until response time is > 8 seconds'.