Quick Guide to Performance Testing Tools That Save You $$$

In this age of modern technology, Performance testing has a significant importance for any business application. Performance testing enables you to make your application more scalable, realizable under concurrent users load. At it’s highest level performance testing is used to measure the continuity and application reputation in the market. Multinational organizations based on the latest technologies are now focusing towards their application monitoring and evaluation process to make it more reliable and durable for maximum amount of users at a time.

In recent past many online business companies have shut down their online applications because of inadequate performance under a heavy load of concurrent transactions by multiple users.

Many open source and commercial performance testing tools are available in the market. Commercial performance testing tools (HP Load runner, IBM Rational Performance Tester) are very expensive. Low and Mid-level organizations cannot afford their current license cost.

So there are many free open source and paid performance tools available in the market to facilitate business applications to determine their performance and identify bottlenecks in the system.

Selection of these tools is a tricky process, but we can have guidelines that might help us to choose best tool available and fulfill our performance testing requirements. While choosing an open source performance testing tool you should keep in mind that a single tool cannot support all technologies supported by an application. E.g Open source tool may support http but not AJAX technology. So you need to be very specific about whether the tool supports everything that your application is using.

Tool selection guidelines include :

1. Protocols support
2. Recording business application and generate script support
3. Replay the recorded business application/script support
4. Correlation and Parameterization support
5. Multiple Iterations and Runtime controller support
6. Scripting language support
7. Network Bandwidth support
8. Analysis of the Business application and generate the report
9. Cross-browser Support
10. Easy to Maintain/Use

Pros:

Main advantages of using open source tools for performance testing are:

• Free or Fair price to purchase and maintain
• Source code is available to extend its functionality if required
• Easy to share the performance testing results
• Uses standard language for scripting

Cons:

• Limited protocol supported
• Lack of Analysis

5 Best Open source performance tools :

JMeter

Jmeter is java based leading free open source performance testing tools. JMeter can be used with another tool with integrated functionality. JMeter is an ideal tool for measuring the performance of the application under network utilization and different working conditions.

JMeter provides support for:

• Multiple protocols such as SOAP, SMTP, HTTP, LDAP, POP3 , JDBC, JMS, TCP, FTP
• Pre, Post processors, Sampler, Listener to generate different performance reports
• Record and play feature of an application
• Web services, web sites and mobile application performance testing
• Plate form Independence, can be run on any plate form using java
• Java, .Net and other technology based applications

Web Load

WebLoad is another commercial grade open source performance testing tool being used to measure and analysis of the web applications. Webload is acquired by RADVIEW.

WebLoad provide support for:

• Multiple technologies .Net, HTML 5 and Web 2.0, Cloud, Mobile, Ajax, Oracle Forms and Adobe Flex
• Multiple web protocols including NNTP, TCP, UDP, HTTP, POP3, HTTPS, TELNET, FTP, SMTP, LDAP, and IMAP.
• Java Based Scripting language
• Dynamic Correlation
• Parameterization
• Load generation from cloud
• Strong built-in Analysis and Monitoring module for analysis and reporting
• Recording and Play back business processes
• Flexible with Pricing and Licensing

LoadUI

LoadUI is an open source stress tool being used to test the performance of Web Applications acquired by SMARTBEAR. LoadUI is available in different versions

1. LoadUI Web (Free)
2. LoadUIWeb Pro (License)

More detailed information about licensing can be found at http://smartbear.com/products/qa-tools/load-testing/pricing/

LoadUI provide support for:

• Multiple web technologies AJAX, ASP.NET, Flash, Flex and Silverlight
• Multiple web services REST, AMF, JMS, JDBC
• Integration with functional testing tool (SoapUI)
• Record and Play business processes
• Data correlations and Parameterization
• Advance Performance test analysis and reporting

Test Maker

Test Maker is an open source performance testing / monitoring tool acquired by PushToTest.com. Test maker provide supports for:

• Multiple Technologies HTTP, POP3, HTTPS, SMTP, SOAP, IMAP and XML-RPC.
• Recording business processes
• Plate form independent i.e can be install on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Macintosh
• Support Selenium Automation Tool
• Transforms test result data into charts and actionable reports

The Grinder

The Grinder is a free open source Java-based load testing tool. The Grinder free license is available under BSD-style. The Grinder is developed by Paco Gomez and maintained by Philip Aston.

Basically The Grinder contains two parts

1. The Grinder Console
   1. The Grinder console used to generate the test scripts. This console is a graphical application which handles all the agents configurations and test results.

2. The Grinder Agents
   1. The Grinder agent is a load generator which used to generate load on the recorded business application. All these agents are connected through a console and submit test result to the console application at the end of test execution.

The Grinder supports for:

• Latest web technologies HTTP, SOAP, REST, and CORBA, RMI, JMS, EJBs
• Network Protocol TCP
• Agent based load generations allows you to generate distributed load on testing application
• Data Parameterization and Correlation
• OS Independent

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