HTTP server benchmarking/load testing in Python

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, 27 Jan 2023 at 03:34, Thomas Passin <list1 at tompassin.net> wrote:
> A nice theory but nothing to do with the real world.  I've had a number
> of laptops that overheat (or would, if I let test program continue)
> running this test program.

Define "overheat". If all you're saying is "the fan began to whine and
I got annoyed so I shut off the program", that is absolutely NOT
overheating. I would accept "the CPU thermally throttled to the point
where the test was non-indicative" as a form of overheating, though
then the warning should be "be aware that, if your web server is
CPU-limited, this test may result in hard-to-interpret numbers due to
requests per second varying with the change in CPU temperature", which
isn't nearly as punchy.

But unless you have a system where the heat sink isn't attached to the
CPU properly, I'd be very surprised if you were able to actually
damage your CPU this way. Maybe you could reduce the lifetime that way
(the same way that crypto mining can shorten the lifespan of a GPU),
but it shouldn't cause any sort of immediate damage. Even on a laptop.

Feel free to prove me wrong, though.

ChrisA