Load Testing Logging

I am building a simple load testing script for my application. It will basically spawn a bunch of threads and hit the staging server to record response times.

I am torn between logging the times on my local computer or on a tabl开发者_JAVA技巧e in the staging server's db. Since I am going to be running a bunch of threads locally, I don't want context switching to throw off the logging timings (or some poor performance out of some logging db like SQLite), but I don't want to slow down IO on the staging server while writing to the log table.

Which is typically done?

Any additional functionality you add to your web application could affect your results, so you probably want to minimize this. If you only care about how long it takes to generate a response on the server side, this may be an ok tradeoff for you. But if you want to measure how long it takes to deliver the response - then you need to measure and record the response from the testing tool. In the latter case, you will then be measuring the effects of load on the network infrastructure (routers, load balancers, firewalls, etc).

FWIW, our load testing tool and most I am familiar with do the latter - record the response time as seen by the end user. In our experience, nearly half of the performance problems we see are on the delivery of the response, rather than the creation of it.