Hi,
I would like to do some stress testing to a WebSocket based application. Anyone knows a tool that may help me in this task?
Update: I forgot to mention, but I'm favoring open source or free tools, given that the tests I'm performing are not for production.
Thanks, Luís M. Costa
LoadRunner is a extremely awesome tool for this very task. I have used for commercial testing with great success. It is great for testing web applications, web services such as SOAP as well as other protocols. You easily setup and control a cluster of machines to perform accurate load tests.
The usual web tools for stress testing are based on pooling (for this I would recommend SoapUI). The idea is to measure the response time for a given request. I don't think this would help to test the actual Web Sockets behavior because that doesn't involve a request; the server just sends data when it is available.
You could adapt the Visual Studio test edition coded webtests to make socket load tests instead of http tests.
Instrumentation is done from perfmon stats and can be stored in a database for more complex reporting.
This is free with the Test Edition SKU or the full Visual Studio licence, so will not be applicable depending on your toolset.