How to Prepare For a Viral Traffic Spike

Wondering if your site could handle a traffic spike?

You can easily conduct a load test to find out.

Load Impact offers a small, basic load tester that you can use for free. Though it’s limited in what it can do, its analysis is quite realistic.

Here’s how it works.

Grace Under Fire

It’s easy to run a load test in Load Impact.

Type in the URL and select the free test. Load Impact will do a series of checks to see how fast your site loads under various conditions.

The first test will test the download time with 10 connections, the second with 20, and so on, all the way up to 50 connections.

The results are updated in a dynamic chart.

Load Impact puts a lot of strain on your server, so you might want to hover over that big red Abort button.

• Ideally there should be a slow, steady increase in the load time between each iteration.
• If your server gets faster (or the graph is flat), Load Impact is not putting enough stress on your server.
• If you see an steep increase in the graph line, your server is reaching the maximum load it can handle.

Limitations and Drawbacks

The first major drawback of Load Impact is its ability to knock out your site. That’s never good.

You also can’t dictate the geographical source of the traffic, nor can you run more than one test per 24 hours on the free account.

On the flip side, if your server handles the impact well, you may find that the free account is too weedy to do a proper load test.

If Your Server Can’t Handle the Load

Load Impact’s Page Analyzer Tool is very handy. It can help you to find the bottlenecks.

The Page Analyzer Tool displays a waterfall graph to show you where the holdups are. (In that regard, it is very similar to Pingdom’s tool).

The different colours help you to identify the cause of the slowdown.

Is Load Impact Worth Using?

Yes, if you want to be prepared.

All too often, content goes viral and the website owner isn’t prepared. The site goes down and nobody’s happy.

Load Impact can prevent that.

A 50-user test might not obliterate your site, but it could help you pick out optimisation opportunities and get a feel for your host’s performance under a moderately heavy load.