load testing tools

So I sit here in my office on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and I’m trying to find more good blogs on load & performance testing. Lots of sources, but many of them aren’t posting very often. I’m trying to find a steady stream of good content. Dynatrace seems to really have the best and most active web performance blogging posts.

Then I came across MSDN blogs. Seemed like a great place to find posts about load testing. Ah…here it is, just what I was looking for: VSTS Load Test Team Blog.

Thanks for the replies to my comparison of LoadStorm and LoadRunner pricing. You make valid points. However, I do not see us as arguing because you are essentially agreeing with me. I have never made any negative statement about the quality of LoadRunner. David’s point in the initial tweet was that LoadRunner is powerful, but for most developers the cost and learning curve make the LR solution a non-starter.

In the past, I was a Microsoft guy. Going all the way back to 1983 when I was working for a small company in Nashville where we hooked a Corona PC with DOS 1.0 to a Ricoh laser printer through a Black Box for desktop publishing. DOS 1.0 was my slave. I knew every command and every switch to make it do exactly what I wanted.

I built EDI systems on a room full of 386 machines, 1200 baud modems, and Microsoft Windows 3.11. The MS FoxPro apps we created turned into separated tiers of architecture with SQL Server, C++, and NT servers.

I found a blog post on linux.com entitled, Using Open Source Software for HTTP Load Testing, but I can’t find supporting explanation of the primary premise: there are only 5 legitimate tools. Here is what I do see:

A good way to see how your Web applications and server will behave under high load is by testing them with a simulated load.If you leave out the load-testing packages that are no longer

In April of 2000, we were releasing the beta version of LearnCentrix. Alltel Corp. was our first client, and we had designed the system to their requirements. I remember the VP of Training asking me, “How many of our employees can be logged on at the same time?” Good question.

I thought about it and gave an accurate, yet indefensible, answer: “There is no system limit.” While I knew that we had no concurrent user restrictions in the code, and there were no configuration settings to enforce a contractual cap, I really had no idea what the practical limit would be.

Websites have evolved significantly since the inception of the internet from simple pages that conveyed information to interactive entities that users can manipulate and utilize for many different purposes. As websites evolved and became more complicated so did the possible interaction between web users and websites giving websites more and more complicated programs, applications, and coding. The increased functionality of websites made them more useful for visitors but also created more ways for the new more complicated programming to fail.

There are several load testing tools that attempt to determine the behavior of systems, networks and servers when an application is concurrently used by a large number of users. Any good testing tool should help you to get a comprehensive picture of end-to-end system performance, test new and upgraded applications against predetermined performance requirements and identify and isolate issues in the application. A good tool also fits your budget. Features and cost are the two big factors in balancing the tool selection equation.

LoadRunner (now called HP LoadRunner, since HP bought Mercury Interactive) is one of the most popular software automation and testing programs on the market. It is a comprehensive testing program that gives webmasters and developers the ability to test the functionality and load managing ability of their website. There are many reasons why LoadRunner is so popular and why it is a good choice as a software testing tool for your website.

JMeter, introduced by Apache Jakarta, is a pure Java desktop application and a widely used software testing tool. It is an open source tool used for load testing client/server applications and allows you to measure and analyze the performance of various services and web applications. It can be used in the form of a unit test for FTP, Webservices, HTTP, JDBC database connections, LDAP, JMS and TCP connections.

To test the strength of JMeter, you can simulate heavy load on an object, a network or a server. Moreover, it is easy to evaluate its performance under diverse load types.