OpenSTA Getting Started Guide

1.0 Introduction

This is a hands-on guide, developed to familiarize new users with OpenSTA. Using it you will able to gain experience of using OpenSTA to load & stress test Web sites. It was preparared using OpenSTA v0.9.0, so some of the screenshots and details may vary for later versions.

Demosite

The demonstration websites provided by the OpenSTA team are intended to be simple illustrations of common website behaviour to be used in gaining experience of how the OpenSTA environment can be used to test a variety of websites.

The simple web application that is used as instructional material is available in two forms, both online and as an installable for you to use locally. Because the online site is on a restricted bandwidth, you are strongly encouraged to download the sources of the sites and install it locally, on a server of your choice. Full instructions on how to do this can be found at: http://opensta.org/demosite/

In writing these simple demos we have made every attempt to keep them simple and thus easily installable. If you find that you have to make special changes (or severe porting) to make them work in your environment then please drop us an email at demosite@opensta.org, we'll be specifically interested if you make them work in radically different environments such as PHP or ASP.

Downloads

To download this Getting Started Guide, please go to:

To download the demosite 'Which US President?' used in this guide, and get the installation instructions and latest details, please go to:

To download the OpenSTA installable and the installation instructions, please go to:

To download the source code for OpenSTA, please visit:

Index

The rest of this guide is split in to sections as follows:

Each of these sections is dependent on the preceding section. It is best to work through each of the 8 sections in order. This guide uses many of the main features of OpenSTA.

Defintion

Load test
using the server or application in a way that would be considered operationally normal with a normal to heavy number of concurrent users.
Stress test
using the server or application in a way that would be considered operationally abnormal. Examples of this could be running a load test with a significantly larger number of users than would normally be expected, or running with some infrastructure or systems software facilities restricted.

Next Section : Starting OpenSTA