Internet Bandwith Question
 

Hi all, is a 10Megabit dedicated line able to accommodate thousands of simultaneous users? The server itself is responsible to handle HTTP request. Is there a way to simulate the case study? Thank you.

Should be fine, unless you start with some really heavy stuff, like big file downloads. T2 for instance is only 6.3Mbits, and theirs quite a few sites that run with lots of users with that.

The thing is even though you could get thousands of users looking at the site, their not all going to be hitting the connection at the same time, and the gaps between transmissions to one user are going to be longer than the time they are actually receieving.

Simulating is harder than most people think as theirs no real way to see how people will behave on diffrent sites, the taffic patterns for this site will be a whole lot diffrent from googles. and diffrent again to say a Linux distro site.

What would feed a thousand forum users might struggle with a thousand distro users.

For a list of stressing tools and testing try Web Test Tools, but without an idea of what the site is supposed to do its hard to tell which one would be useful to you.

Thanks for clearing up my mind. In my confusion, I thought the formula of calculating the bandwidth usage is just: number of users x data transfered. I didn't take into account of the gap time among the transmissions.

Actually my company is about to implement a region-wide education portal, students and teachers from different schools will be able to login to the site to use the online E-learning facilities. The site is supposed to feed the users some PHP pages, rendered by Apache and MySQL backend database, perhaps the users can upload/download some images/word files or something.

I'm wondering which kind of Web Test Tools I shall use if that's the case.

Your best bet would be to try several of them out, funkloads okay but hasn't got the flexability you would really require. There are several that would test it more thoroughly, but it depends on what you have already set up.

I've used WebPerformance Analyser before, during development just to get a handle on how the site is progressing.

Some of the remote ones are good ( Test Perspective Load Test, Avalanche and Openload ), since they do actually test how things would seem from someone hitting your website, so they test all the connections but its still from only one remote site. They can get expensive though.

Have a look through pick ones that sound good.