Most farmers don't like the idea of their cornfields being hit hard by a storm. However, this is bit different.

The DrupalCorn Camp 2012 will be held on the Iowa State University campus in Ames on August 3-4, 2012 for open source enthusiasts, Drupal designers, hackers, Drupal developers, UI experts, IT managers, and web performance geeks like us.

We here at LoadStorm are Drupal fans because this site is built on it. We have worked with Drupal for many sites, and it is a great open source app for publishing content.

The highlight of this world-class event is Thunder and Lightning: LoadStorm and Other Ways to Stress Out Your Drupal Site by Andy Kucharski, who is considered to be on the best Drupal developers in the world. His company of Drupal experts are highly recommended in the open source community. Our customers have worked with them to improve the performance of project built upon Drupal's code. There are so many configuration settings and Drupal app intricacies that affect performance that it usually pays big dividends to Andy and his team involved.

Apparently, he likes LoadStorm as a load testing tool. We are honored to be associated with such a skilled open source geek, and we wish to support Andy in his presentation. Please register for the event if you can be in Ames Friday and Saturday.

David Makogon tweeted something interesting a couple of weeks ago. It caught my attention and seemed to be very accurate, so I re-tweeted it. His post was:

"Agreed. LoadRunner is powerful, but steep learning curve+cost. 80/20 rule: do you "really" need it?"

So after I re-tweeted David's post, I got a response from @mtomlins that said:

"@loadstorm If you need speed, confidence, accuracy, scalability and reliability...then you need #LoadRunner and it's worth every cent"

That struck me as a haughty reply from someone that must think very highly of their own opinion.

I have no reason to argue with David's comment about learning curve and cost. It's no secret that load testers, QA professionals, and performance engineers all over the world know that LR is the most expensive solution available. Wonder why @mtomlins wanted to argue about it?

Here is the thread of Twitter exchanges that ensued (I'm @loadstorm):

loadstorm: @mtomlins so are you saying there is only one solution to get speed, confidence, accuracy, scalability, and reliability in an application?

mtomlins: @loadstorm There are perf testing tools that do a few things very well. I would argue that #LoadRunner does very many things very well.

loadstorm: @mtomlins Agreed it does many things very well. @dmakogon said so. His point was it's very expensive. What's cost for one 5,000 user test?

Expensive?...depends on the comparison. 3 years of LoadStorm costs about $35k, which isn't pocket change for most testers.

loadstorm: @mtomlins How much would 5,000 concurrent users cost for 3 years if I used LoadRunner?

So far I haven't received an answer from him. Notice how he deflected the question. I was truly curious about this guy at this point. Why would he go out of his way to try to make LoadStorm sound expensive? What motivation would he have to even be so silly as compare LoadStorm vs. LoadRunner on price?! You gotta be kidding me!