So far, we have explored how to push our application to the brink of failure by attacking it with massive floods of concurrent requests. The load tests created with Siege and Blitz are helpful in finding performance bottlenecks in our application, but they do not exactly replicate real-world situations. Normal site usage will usually follow a few different patterns. For example, let's imagine a typical e-commerce web application. There are probably three main usages of the application. Ninety percent of the application's users are most likely browsing the home page or the product catalog. Another 5 percent of the users are going through the checkout process, and the final 5 percent might be viewing order or account information. By recreating these scenarios, we can get an accurate view of how our application will behave for real users.

In this recipe, we will be introduced to Load Impact, a load-testing tool that will allow us to mimic real-world...