Gathering data and stats for performance testing

Sometimes when performance testing you need to do some research into other websites so you can make predictions on how people will use yours. This can be a time consuming. You need to think of sites that will have similar users with similar usage patterns. They need to be roughly the same size and scope for the data to be transferable. It's not easy.

Once you've thought of some sites, you then need to get stats. There are a lot of ways and places to get those stats. Some of them reputable, some of them not. One place I turn to for some basic stats is Alexa. They seem to have good data, it's a very easy site to use, and I always find out a bit more than I was looking for.