Techniques to measure application performance

Question

Hi there,

I maintain an application which, during the course of two years, has constantly required new hardware to be even usable, due to the amount of new users / new data inserted. However, justifying the investiment is sometimes very hard to do.

I started to wonder - how can I establish the maximum number of users a web application currently suports?

I thought of using JMeter scripts but they can get really nasty to implement when having to simulate file transfers and decison trees. What do you guys use?

Answer 1

We use HP's LoadRunner. But it's not cheap, and you still have to create scripts, test cases.

Answer 2

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/146092/what-are-the-best-resources-to-learn-about-capacity-planning#152908