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.

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.

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.

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.

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.