sponsored by
episec:
internet security for the paranoid.
slowget
ari edelkind - custom works
blurb
slowget is a load testing program that emulates slow connections from modem
users. Some people don't realize that while testing the performance of
their web servers from an ethernet connection may yield reasonably accurate
results for how their systems would perform if everyone accessed their sites
via ethernet connections, most people don't actually use ethernet
connections the majority of the time.
If a modem user on a slow link connects to a server process and downloads a
256 kilobyte page, it may take about one and a half minutes to complete.
That's one and a half minutes that this one server process stays occupied.
If another system connects to the server, another process must be used
(spawned, if it's not already waiting). You end up with more server
processes than you have memory for and more fork()s than you have
processing power for, even though you only have a moderate number of
connections per second.
This very reason is why various hardware vendors created cards to
essentially add a proxy with a rather large connection cache to the system,
taking the connection responsibility off of the web server well before the
data has been completely downloaded by the remote user.
So, great, you have hardware solutions. Or you don't have hardware
solutions. Either way, how do you run proper slow-connection tests without
hundreds of machines connected via modems, all connecting on demand? You
use slowget.
[At some point, documentation will end up here as well.]
download
The current version is
slowget-20010917-1.tar.gz.
The current version can always be downloaded as
slowget-current.tar.gz.
MD5 sums may be viewed
here.
ari edelkind - [contact]