Web application testing

[mcturkey]

I'm looking for a good program to test the responsiveness of my web site. I basically need it to act like a browser following various links on the site in the way a user would, then give me response times for each page load. I've been doing server-side response time tracking of my own, but I really need something that can give me a lot of hits, and preferably concurrent users.

All the programs I've come across so far either have little to no documentation or explanation of use, or have to be run server-side, which is not really an option for me right now.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Argo]

Check out: http://www.pingdom.com/tools/fpt/

 

[George P Burdell]

Start with apache bench

 

[KB]

This one will do alot, but its costs alot too. http://www.mercury.com/us/prod...nce-center/loadrunner/

 

[fs5]

http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

 

[mcturkey]

Thanks for all the links! From what I can tell, my site seems to be more limited by my host than application performance, as the server-side tracking I was doing internally was showing load times in the 15-20ms range for each page, but ab reported an average of 66ms over 100 instances. So I guess there's not much additional performance to be had out of my code. Not sure how I feel about that, though.

 

[nweaver]

jmeter is OK, Mercury is way to expensive. We do professional web load testing, and have used both, but normally just use Radview.

 

[lozina]

omg stay away from LoadRunner... what a piece of crap. It sure does print nice reports though!

our company has access to LoadRunner but we prefer JMeter. It's simple, quick and handles most of the situations we want to test.

 

[joshg]

LoadRunner is amazing but takes a ton of work to set up. It's really made for doing high end stress / load tests on apps while simultaneously monitoring server / network / databases / etc... probably way overkill for this use (and sounds like maybe your companie's use also!). And yes very expensive! :Q

An alternative to LoadRunner is to use Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Suite / Software Testers thing... but again you have to build all of your test scripts and the like, pretty similar to LoadRunner...

 

[troytime]

I like to just put my stuff live and watch to see if the db admin has any reaction :evil:

 

[mcturkey]

I tried JMeter, but was so confused by the options that I gave up on it. One of these days I'm just going to have to set aside the time to learn how to use it. I'm probably going to have to setup a local server for any significant testing of my app, because it looks as though my current web host is going to be the main bottleneck, and I really want to know for sure that this can scale beyond that *before* it needs to.