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719

answers:

3

We're looking for a cheapish, easy-to-use stress testing tool to record a user's flow through our website and then hammer it with that script until it falls over. Our requirements are:

1) Certain URL's need to be called with a Session Id that is returned in previous calls. So there must be some way of generating dynamic URL's based on data returned by a previous URL.

2) The first hit by a thread should always act like a "new user" who doesn't have any images cached in their browser. Only subsequent hits from that thread would take advantage of any URL caching.

3) The tool should be able to test either with a specified number of threads (while we monitor machine performance) or to generate as many threads as it can until it hits a server error.

4) Full detailed reports/graphing.

We've looked at some simple tools like Microsoft Web App Stress Tool, which does not seem to handle the caching or dynamic URL's very well. We can't afford tools like MS Team Suite. Any ideas?

+1  A: 

I've had really good luck with NUnit in the past. I think even I remember Joel and Jeff saying they used it on one of the stackoverflow podcasts.

I've also used the Microsoft Web App Stress Tool in the past, but it's not quite as sophisticated.

As for your price concerns, NUnit is open-source and free.

KA

Kaiser Advisor
+5  A: 

JMeter is nice for this.

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

Dustin
+1  A: 

opensourcetesting.org has a nice list of open source perf test tools. In addition to JMeter, WebLOAD (a commercial tool) has an open source variant.

Tom E