JMeter versus The Grinder?

Question

I'm looking at stress testing our website and having trouble picking the right tool.

It looks to me like two of the most popular are JMeter and The Grinder. Can anyone help with reasons in favor of either?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I have worked a bunch with The Grinder and there are three main reasons I like it.

1. It's free. I assume from your question, you are only looking at free solutions. There are some excellent commercial products as well, but most of the time, I cannot justify the cost
2. It is easy to start up processes on other machines. When really trying to crank up load on a cluster, I need to easily distribute the load out to remote machines. Grinder is great for that.
3. The scripts are all Jython. That allows me to easily customize my scripts to programatically tweak my scripts (e.g. randomize certain paths).

I haven't used JMeter in a long time, so I cannot say authoritatively how it compares on points 2 & 3.

Answer 2

If you're not familiar with Jython (like I wasn't) then there is also a great little tool that comes with Grinder (the TCP Proxy or some such name) that allows you to click around in a webapp and save your actions as a ready-made Jython script for Grinder, which you can then analyse/edit/adopt as necessary.