The title says it all. I'm looking for a good set of tools that I can use to load test a web application on IIS 7 before deployment.
3 Answers
I believe Apache Bench is pretty widely used for this sort of thing and can be used without any problem against other webservers. It's command-line based, so it should be pretty easy to script into your test suite or pre-deployment scripts.
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ab is a good indicator but not much more. For real load testing you can't beat the 'web avalanche' appliance - you can rent them. – Rich Jun 02 '09 at 14:43
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AB was just what I needed, I was having SSL problems using WCAT, and couldn't get most other tools to work. Didn't care much about the load, just wanted it to generate a bunch of requests so I could test my server. – davenpcj Jul 31 '11 at 00:17
There are a couple of good tools available:
Not free, but excellent if you are doing this professionally is Visual Studio Team System Test Load Agent. MSDN covers how to set it up and run it here: Controllers, Agents, and Rigs. You can download a trial here:
- Visual Studio Team System 2010 Test Load Agent Beta 1
- Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Load Agent (90-day Trial)
As far as free tools...
Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT):
Overview: Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT) is a lightweight HTTP load generation tool primarily designed to measure the performance of a web server within a controlled environment. WCAT can simulate thousands of concurrent users making requests to a single web site or multiple web sites. The WCAT engine uses a simple script to define the set of HTTP requests to be played back to the web server. Extensibility is provided through plug-in DLLs and a standard, simple API.
Features:
- HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 capable
- Supports IPv6 Multithreaded Support
- Supports generating stress from multiple machines
- Extensible through C plug-in
- DLLs Supports Performance Counter integration
- Measures throughput and response time
- Supports SSL requests
- NTLM Authentication request support
- Easily supports testing thousand of concurrent users
Download the x86 version here, and the x64 version here.