title: Using a cloud service to stress test a web application
body: <p>I am doing a research project regarding scalability. I have created a web app on Windows Azure and now need to test it with millions of users. I was thinking of doing the following:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Create a simple program which uses <a href="http://docs.seleniumhq.org/">Selenium</a> to send requests to the
  web app</li>
  <li>Integrate this program as another Azure cloud service</li>
  <li>Increase the instance count to increase the number of concurrent
  connections</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>The reason I want to use Selenium and not just send normal http requests is that I also need to test the app's Javascript. My questions are:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Is it possible to use Selenium as a Windows Azure worker role/virtual
  machine?</li>
  <li>Can Selenium send multiple requests at once? I will be using multiple
  instances, however each instance will need to be able to generate
  about 2000 or more requests per second, is this possible?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Can this be done using Selenium or are there better ways of doing this? I've also seen JMeter but since it's in Java I don't think I can use it as an Azure worker role</p>
  
  <p>Requirements:
  Generate 100 million hits in about 15 minutes-30 minutes 
  I'm expecting to use about 40-50 instances on Azure which means each instance needs to generate about 2000 requests per second</p>