[thelist] Load testing websites / web apps

[Matt Warden]

On 4/9/07, Paul Bennett <Paul.Bennett at wcc.govt.nz> wrote:
> Mercury LoadRunner looks great, but may be overkill for us. Given that I have to 'contact a supplier' for a price, I'm guessing that the cost will make me choke on my lunch and that purchasing the product will get me 2 years of annoying phone calls from the suppliers 'Enterprise Integration' team wanting to find consulting business in my organisation?
>

Yes, the price may make you cry.

If most of your site is static, then LR is definitely overkill. In the
case of a mostly static site, you're more looking for something that
has a good reporting package and can create pretty graphs for you
based on the test results, as executing the test itself would be
rather easy.

One thing to be careful of, though: if your site uses cookies beyond a
simple session ID, then your results could have questionable validity
if your test does not transfer this cookie data as a payload on the
request. See:

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/03/01/performance-research-part-3/

You may want to put some extra thought along these lines as well. For
example, if your pages have external CSS, script, or image files, then
you need to account for that in your test if your tool does not.
(Meaning, these files would be downloaded by a browser, but if you
simply blindly request foo.htm and assume that is equivalent to a
browser requesting foo.htm, it obviously isn't unless all the related
files are requested as well.)

-- 
Matt Warden
Cleveland, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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