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Here are a couple of posts I've made in the past about OpenSTA, an open source "Web load and stress testing tool", which
was released under the GPL

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=116421&cid=9853594
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155207&cid=13011524

The web site is still there, but nothing seems to have happened since 2007.

The closest open source testing tool I have found, that resembles Load Runner the most is OpenSTA: http://opensta.org/

There is a reason why this is a specialty. There isn't a clear answer.

The answer depends on many factors such as:
- how heavy are the pages (many pictures?)
- what's the platform (Lamp/J2EE/etc....)
- how is the usage?, if someone gives you a figure for concurrent users, ask yourself what they mean by that. Some apps have users contstantly submitting, others once in a few minutes
- how are they connected? Reverse proxy can really help for slow connections!
- if you have performance problems, investigate where the pain really is. Is it the (R)DBMS, or the app server, memory IO.
- etc. etc.

Most of all: test! Get something like grinder, or opensta and put some serious load and stress on the setup. See where it hurts.
Make sure that if you have a problem, you actually fix the right problem. It is ok to add hardware, but you have to know what hardware to get.
Also many problems can be handled by configuration, such as preventing the system to come to crashing halt by limiting the amount of connections to the amount you can handle.

Look overhere Perl strategy doc It has some good advice that will help you also in non perl environments.

It's designed to stress test web pages, and analyse the load on web servers, database servers and operating systems.

There is also a new company - Cyrano that has risen from the ashes of the old one, and provides many other testing tools, including regression testing.

See OpenSTA, an Open Source load testing application for web applications, with some more links in the WebLink section on portal.opensta.org

See OpenSTA, an Open Source load testing application for web applications, with some more links in the WebLink section on portal.opensta.org

Have you looked at OpenSTA? Our development team in NH uses it and they enjoy it quite well.

I've used Mercury products for unit testing, full out scaling tests, monitoring, and defect tracking for over three years. The problem was the total cost of a Mercury load test bed. It gets expensive rather quickly unless you have planned in advance or do a lot of Mercury work. If you don't it makes more sense to hire a consultant that has an open license arrangement. That way you only pay for when you use it. YMMV.

So, I looked into some other alternatives and ended up going to unit test applications from the Apache group and home grown benchmarks to approximate load scenarios.

Eventually, I ended up looking into OpenSTA OpenSTA and was fortunate enough to work with some real experts that did a lot of load testing work with OpenSTA. There are some limitations to the OpenSTA *cough* Windows only *cough* but overall it is an excellent tool for driving load for a complex web application. Much like Mercury or any load testing tool the test is only as good as the planning and analysis you perform to isolate performance issues.

My most recent job called for load testing but in that time Mercury changed their license program again and we really wanted to use something that would run on Linux. So, OpenSTA was not really in the running. Also, we needed to simulate multiple IP addresses not just hundreds of virtual users from a single source address. (fine for simulations of a access from a corporate firewall). So, I had to find something that would work and that wouldn't blow our budget.

I checked back with a company called WebPerformance Inc. Now, I looked into a few years ago to see if they supported IP spoofing for virtual users and SSL. They had done SSL but the IP spoofing wasn't done.

As it turns out, they put this feature into their 2.6 release. We use it to run our large tests for burn in and acceptance for revisions to our network hardware that provides web interface. Like Mercury, you can really ramp up serious traffic. Couple this with basic network load generation and you can create a sound simulation of network throughput and application access from multiple network addresses with mulitple users and multiple business cases. Oh, and the fact that you can get a price list that is straight forward is very nice.

So, I'd say each is right for a certain type of test and a certain type of shop. For our shop, Mercury is cost prohibitive, OpenSTA lacks a key feature (IP Spoofing), and WebPerformance, Inc -- while commercial -- satifies our feature requirements near perfectly.

Since that article was posted, I was asked by my company to do some load and scalability testing and I've had great success with OpenSTA. Give it a chance. It's awkward at once but once you get a feel for the HTTP/S (http scripting) language, you can do some very complicated scripting with it.

For example I wrote a script which interacts with one of our web products and navigates through several pages, submitting queries, retrieving 'wait' pages, and continuing on when the results are ready. Can't do that with wget... heh. And it gives excellent feeback on timing and can remotely monitor CPU and memory usage.

As far as I know it is only available on windows, though it is open source.

OpenSTA is for HTTP and HTTPS stresstesting, not for GUI. It does fairly well in this matters, but is not what the original author was looking for.

The commercial support page you mentioned has not been updated for quite some time - but there's replacement coming up - check http://portal.opensta.org/faq.php?topic=Commercial Support and other topics in this faq for more information.

Olaf