List of top web application load and stress test tools

Are you about to release a web application to the public or  to an internal department?

The big question is, has your testing team completed a thorough test on the web application? There are many types of tests which should be conducted namely regression test, functional test, system test and other types of test.

Two of the most important tests which must be carried out is load and stress testing. Most performance issues will arise only when the server is stressed with high user load so the only way to overcome this would be to run the tests to find out how many concurrent visitors the web application can serve without any problems.

It’s not easy to conduct load and stress test because it’s really challenging to get a group of people to access the web application at the same time. To overcome this challenge, one can utilize advanced automatic load and stress testing tools. The following are 8 good web application load and stress test tools for your testers to try and evaluate.

WebLOAD is an open source tool for load testing, stress testing and performance testing that is sponsored by RadView. It can load-test any Internet application, including applications that use Web 2.0 & AJAX. This project is based on twelve years of code development invested in the previously proprietary WebLOAD, the award winning commercial performance testing solution for internet applications from Radview Software. WebLOAD is a great starting point for this project, with a community of more than 1,600 customers and a track record established on the merits of its robust functionality, efficient architecture, extensibility, support, quality and its ease of use.

FunkLoad is a functional and load web tester, written in Python, whose main use cases includes Functional testing of web projects and regression testing as well. It’s also capable of performance testing your app by loading the web application and monitoring your servers which helps to pinpoint bottlenecks, giving a detailed report of performance measurement. FunkLoad also expose bugs that do not surface in cursory testing, like volume testing or longevity testing.

OpenSTA is a distributed software testing architecture designed around CORBA, it was originally developed to be commercial software by CYRANO. The current toolset has the capability of performing scripted HTTP and HTTPS heavy load tests with performance measurements from Win32 platforms. Testing can be performed using the record and replay metaphor common in most other similar commercially available toolsets. Results and statistics are collected during test runs by a variety of automatic and user controlled mechanisms which include scripted timers, SNMP data, Windows Performance Monitor stats and HTTP results & timings.

An open-source tool written in C-language, simulating application load and application behavior of thousands and tens of thousand HTTP/HTTPS and FTP/FTPS clients, each with its own source IP-address. The tool is useful for performance loading of various application services, for testing web and ftp servers and traffic generation. Activities of each virtual client are logged and collected statistics includes information about resolving, connection establishment, sending of requests, receiving responses, headers and data received/sent, errors from network, TLS/SSL and application (HTTP, FTP) level events and errors.

JCrawler is an open-source (under the CPL) Stress-Testing Tool for web-applications. It comes with the crawling/exploratory feature. You can give JCrawler a set of starting URLs and it will begin crawling from that point onwards, going through any URLs it can find on its way and generating load on the web application. The load parameters (hits/sec) are configurable.

Pylot is a free open source tool for testing performance and scalability of web services. It runs HTTP load tests, which are useful for capacity planning, benchmarking, analysis, and system tuning. Pylot generates concurrent load (HTTP Requests) , verifies server responses, and produces reports with metrics. Tests suites are executed and monitored from a GUI.

Sloppy deliberately slows the transfer of data between client and server. Example usage: you probably build web sites on your local network, which is fast. Using Sloppy is one way to get the “dial-up experience” of your work without the hassle of having to install a modem.

WebInject is a free tool for automated testing of web applications and web services. It can be used to test individual system components that have HTTP interfaces (JSP, ASP, CGI, PHP, AJAX, Servlets, HTML Forms, XML/SOAP Web Services, REST, etc), and can be used as a test harness to create a suite of [HTTP level] automated functional, acceptance, and regression tests. A test harness allows you to run many test cases and collect/report your results. WebInject offers real-time results display and may also be used for monitoring system response times. WebInject can be used as a complete test framework that is controlled by the WebInject User Interface (GUI). Optionally, it can be used as a standalone test runner (text/console application) which can be integrated and called from other test frameworks or applications.

Commercial  load and stress test tools

WAPT is a load and stress testing tool for websites and web-based applications. It uses a fully customizable set of virtual users to simulate a real-life load. Test scenario can be detailed up to unique parameters for each individual user. Testing of dynamic web applications, recording and playback of HTTPS requests, and several authentication schemes are supported. Descriptive graphs and reports allow you to see and fix performance bottlenecks. Download WAPT

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