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Jun

11

Stress Testing Web Applications on OS X?

Filed Under technology |

I am about to roll out a new edition of a client’s site that has some pretty significant code changes, and we will also be upgrading their current server infrastructure. Our team would be interested in recording some raw stress metrics to see how it compares to our new roll out. Now, when I was on the Windows platform, there was a great tool that they released called WAST (Web Application Stress Tool) that I used pretty extensively. I have VMWare Fusion, so in theory I could use this if there are no alternatives, but I am going to be pretty shocked if there really are no alternatives.

So, what do you guys use?


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6 Comments so far

  1. Tom Mollerus on June 11, 2008 7:39 pm

    There’s always the Selenium IDE for Firefox.
    http://selenium.openqa.org/index.html#Selenium_IDE

  2. Derek P. on June 11, 2008 9:03 pm

    @Tom,

    Thanks for the advice! I’ve not looked too closely into Selenium, but from the looks of the site, it seems like its more about usability testing of site functionality, rather than application load testing.

  3. Kurt Wiersma on June 12, 2008 9:15 am

    I have used jmeter in the past but have also wondered if there is a something a little more user friendly out there. Once you figure out jmeter it isn’t to bad.

  4. Michael Sharman on June 13, 2008 6:22 pm

    I agree with Kurt, JMeter (from the Apache group) is a great tool and extremely flexible.

    You just need to figure out how to use it!

    But when you do you can;
    - Record a sample user session (like a recording macro)
    - Have local variables per ‘thread group’ (maybe from a .csv file of users)
    - Have cookie managers to keep track of session state between requests
    - Have sample timeouts between requests to simulate a realistic load

    + tonnes more.

    You also get your choice of how to report on the data, it’s really an amazing tool

  5. 來 on June 13, 2008 10:15 pm

    I have used jmeter in the past but have also wondered if there is a something a little more user friendly out there. Once you figure out jmeter it isn’t to bad.

  6. Andrew Vit on July 9, 2008 1:09 pm

    I used one called Grinder with success. It’s java based and works well on the Mac. You can record your actions into a script by using its proxy, which records your requests and passes them through to your web app. You can then edit the request scripts, which are a pretty straightforward syntax. Then, there’s a GUI front agent for starting the test and controlling other hosts to do the load generation (which can be the self-same Mac if that works for your purpose).