Testing Web application software and SOAP-based Web Services for performance and scalability is no longer not an option. Load, a free open-source test utility, features a scripting language and library of test objects to create intelligent agents that drive a Web application. Running hundreds of agents concurrently shows how your software performs in production environments.

Read more: http://www.pushtotest.com/p2t/home.html?rid=R4.

Can't access the web site

I am so sorry that you have not been able to reach the PushtoTest Web site. I have been in contact with our ISP several times today about the connectivity problems with the PushToTest Web site. Our ISP has had their local phone company technicians out to look at their T1 lines today. They are working on the problem and expect a fix soon.

The problem is intermittent, so if you don't succeed the first time, please try again.

By the way, we had set-up a Load test agent as a service monitor on the PushToTest Web site. It's been sounding the alarm even before our ISP told us of the problem. We'll be posting the service monitor agent scripts next week to the site so you can set-up your own monitor.

-Frank Cohen
Founder, www.PushToTest.com
fcohen at pushtotest dot com

Can someone give a feature by feature comparison with JMeter - the other open source load testing application by the Apache Jakarta team?

Replying to my earlier post on the subject. I was already familar with JMeter. This seems to have more standard functionality of a load tester given it all works as described. Our team has used JMeter and had to ignore the fact that there wasn't any easy way to insert random items into get/port requests (no scripting language) as well as the error reporting doesn't work half the time. I am about to try Load out to see if it does what it claims.

BTW, the best description of Load so far seems to be:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-load.html

Thanks for the comments about Load. As the principal maintainer for Load I am also interested to see what people have to say about Load.

Another article that describes Load and Web services is at:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-testsoap/

Hope this helps.

You can also send me email to fcohen at pushtotest dot com.

Thanks.

-Frank

Now that you are on the topic of web services testing tools, I would recommend taking a look at Empirix's FirstACT tool. FirstACT does performance and functional testing of web services, and it has been doing it for some time. It s from a commericial tool vendor, which has its good and bad points for some people.

P.S. I haven't used FirstACT myself (another group does here), but I have been actively using their sister product called Bean-test for EJB testing. Bean-test is a very good tool, so I would like to assume FirstACT is as well.

Re: Re: My previous post

Had some more time to evaluate Load. While it has all the ideas of what is needed in addition to JMeter, most have problems when you really get down to it. I was trying to get it to run on Linux which might be part of the problem as it was definately developed under Windows mostly. Either way, upon looking at the source, some of the features have some significant implementation problems.

Examples:
1. Uses Swing XML editor pane which fails with div/0 problems on Linux
2. Sleeps for a few milliseconds after each line read on reads from server - kinda kills the idea of load testing
3. Problems with the threading of URL connections. On linux, a post turned into a post/get/get instead of a single request. This is due to the funky threading code connected to the URL object.

I think with a fair ammount of work it would surpass JMeter in terms of a scriptable load engine, but for now they both have problems that make them mostly unusable.

Back to square one.

So if both load and Jmeter have problems what load tester would anyone recommend, open source or otherwise.

I'm the principal mainainer for Load, so take this with a grain of salt...

Load is a utility to develop intelligent test agents with which you can test a Web service for scalability and performance. JMeter and Load both create near real-world traffic to see how a Web service handles users. Load comes with a scripting language and library of test objects. JMeter has essentially the same - just their scripting is done visually with a nice set of graphical objects. Load outputs the results to a log window and log file. JMeter has interesting graphical meters that can show visually how a test is going. Both are Java applications distributed under an Apache-style license - you're free to make improvements and even build your own commercial products from the code.

JMeter is at http://www.apache.org

Load is at http://www.pushtotest.com

Hope this helps. Feel free to send me email to fcohen at pushtotest dot com.

-Frank

Can we test java swing application talking to webserver through some http calls. Can we simulate Swing Application VUsers in JMeter ?