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Tools for Stress Testing Websites?

Posted by Cliff on from the breaking-things-in-a-controlled-environment dept.

rickindy asks: "What do you usedfor web site load testing tools? Open source or commercial is fine, but my employer it hosting a boatload of sites, and we would like to find the breaking point for the server at some time other than 3:00am."

7 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe this will help? by hhe_hee · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think this link can be helpful for you, it provides a huge list of web test tools. They are organized in categories for which sort of test one would like to perform. They also have a FAQ which answers several questions about how sites can be tested, and it also points out what things you should think about, like; what are the expected loads, who is the target audience, what kind of performance is expected on the client side, and so on.

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  2. http_load by elbuddha · · Score: 3, Informative



    http://www.acme.com/software/http_load/

  3. WAST by Merkins · · Score: 2, Informative

    This will probably get me strung up.... but Microsoft have a free one called the "Web Application Stress Tool".

    Might be worth a look if you have an MS Box to run it on.

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    1. Re:WAST by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      I am head of Performance Testing at a very large retail site. While free, WAST, aka Homer sux.
      Make sure and look for tools that can records scripts against port 443.

  4. Jakarta JMeter by Gill+Bates · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's the Jakarta project's JMeter, from the folks at Apache. It's written in Java, but can be used to load test a wide variety of network resources.

  5. Re:Mercury Interactive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner tool works in this space (among others), and does a pretty good job of it. One point: you really want to get someone trained with the product; there's a lot of companies that have bought it and left it on the shelf because it's not exactly simple to use. It's not cheap either; licence costs are per "virtual user" and get pretty steep pretty fast unless you can negotiate some sort of discount with Mercury directly.

    And as a Mercury Certified Product Specialist, allow me to introduce myself...

    All jokes aside: It is a good tool, I'm not employed by Mercury Interactive, and I am trained/certified with it (along with a bunch of other people) so it pays my bills to some extent. Take my advice with this in mind

  6. Capacity Calibration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Capacity Calibration (www.capcal.com) does real life load testing of websites using a distributed.net type of thing with agent software running on hundreds of thousands of machines across the Internet. They aren't free, but they are real life.