title: Load Testing for Amazon server EC2 with httperf
body: <p>I am using Amazon EC2 services for my web services. I would like to know the maximum number of users that can simultaneously use my web services.</p>
  
  <p>For this, I performed load testing using httperf from the client system. </p>
  
  <p>When the Reply Rate is nearly equal to Request Rate then we can tell that the server is doing well. But for request rate 5 I was getting the reply rate as 1 when testing was done for 20 samples. The value of time-out was 5. Also, many requests were timed out; 300 out of 500 were timed out.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Is this because I am conducting the test on the client? How do I install httperf on the server?</li>
  <li>Am I doing something wrong? The following is the command that I used on the load testing tool with httperf: <code>httperf --server=web-service-url --rate=5 --num-conns=500 --timeout=5</code></li>
  <li>Is httperf a good tool for load testing?</li>
  <li>Does Amazon provide any other mechanisms for load testing?</li>
  <li>The above load testing was done for a web service of type GET. Do we need to conduct separate load testing for POST request and if so, how do we do this?</li>
  </ol>