In stress test do you control hits/second? how do you do stress test

Question

I have to do a stress test with 500 users on a web site. How do I approach this one. Do I need to control the hits/second Jmeter makes to the server Or I just need to ramp up threads and let it do whatever the maximum hits it can do. What should be my user step in delay(eg: one user/thread starts every 15sec or 20 sec). What should be delay between samples.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I would suggest 500 users with 1500 ramp-up — it gives 3 seconds for a new user to come up. Additionally force those 500 users to loop infinity or let's say 100 times. Then all of 500 will be on the system at the same time and in different places. That would suggest a more real testing scenario.

Moreover, I would suggest you to put random timers between samplers as well. A test which just goes through all requests without any delays is as fake as it gets. Can you switch between pages in 35ms? Of course not, so why should you test that.