Scott Oaks has blogged about Faban, another open source web load generator, this one from Sun and in Java. Faban is "designed to automate running benchmarks from a set of clients, which is of course quite useful when trying to generate load on an application server," a task similar to Apache's ab rather than JMeter. It's released under the CDDL. It'd be interesting to see how it compares, long term, to JMeter - and if it's indeed better at generating simple load compared to ab.

Similar to JMeter

All these open source load generating tools including Jmeter lack in good documentation. Ofcourse its free and i should be thankful blah blah blah ... but documentation really sucks. thahts why most big companies rely on paid very expensive tools. I hope sun documents this one well.

Similar to JMeter

All these open source load generating tools including Jmeter lack in good documentation. Ofcourse its free and i should be thankful blah blah blah ... but documentation really sucks. thahts why most big companies rely on paid very expensive tools. I hope sun documents this one well.

I know what you mean. JMeter does need better documentation. Back when I was more active, I tried to write more docs, but honestly writing great docs is like 100x harder than writing code. Even the most mundane tasks are difficult to document such that anyone can pick it up and understand it within an hour. But the problem is not unique to OSS though. I've seen expensive products that cost 200K+ with docs worse than open source. Writing great docs is just hard and takes 10x more effort than coding. peter

Fortunallly for some people the JMeter doc is enough. When i used it i was very happy to find a pretty good doc. But i can hear that for some other people the doc was not enough.

PushToTest TestMaker users offer compliments on the product's documentation. So I wouldn't say "all" of the test tools docs are poor. About Faban, I'm wondering why it's licensed under the CDDL and not GPL? -Frank Cohen http://www.pushtotest.com

Sorry I saw this one late. So why CDDL and not GPL? There is a fairly big issue with GPL in that code linked with GPL libraries will need to be used inside the org or released under GPL. Benchmark developers should be allowed to put a different license on their benchmark or even provide it under their own license, at cost. So GPL fell straight off the list for Faban's use case. The short list was actually BSD, Apache2.0 or later, or CDDL.

As far as I know Faban is not just another WebLoader generator. You have support for annotations.. so it should be much nicer to write load generators.