Smoke Testing

A good first test, is to use wget to verify that the site is delivering the content (at all) and how fast it does this over time. While issuing this command, watch the OS resources (using e.g. top, vmstat and iotop) and the performance summary pages in the escenic-admin web application.

This command will download the given section pages with all its linked resources, such as images, style sheets and JavaScripts. It should always be run several times as you may hit the system in a too good or too bad point in time: when the caches are being filled up, when the connection to the database needs to be re-established or when the JVM is performing garbage collection. For these reasons, the command is performed inside a for loop that executes it ten times:

$ for el in {0..9}; do
  date; time wget -p --delete-after http://mysite.com/ -o /dev/null;
done

This is also a good way of filling up the front end caches after these have been flushed (for instance after a new deployment of your portal software).