Test Your Web Apps - article at LinuxQuality

[Julian Midgley]

In article <3AA34C6B.EC12B25B at goingware.com>,
Michael D. Crawford <crawford at goingware.com> wrote:
>Tonight I posted:
>
>Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications
>http://linuxquality.sunsite.dk/articles/webapptesting/
>
>The article promotes the idea that one should check the HTML
>generated by a web application with a validator to ensure that
>it conforms to W3C standards, and that you should use a load
>generator to stress-test your server during development to
>detect performance problems early.
>
>Links to some load generators and validators are given, with
>tips on using them.

For performance testing of websites, I would recommend httperf and
ApacheBench above most of the tools you've listed.  ApacheBench is
distributed with Apache (look for 'ab.c'), and is a useful tool for
simple benchmarking.  

ApacheBench is particular nice because it is itself extremely
efficient.  It uses a single non-threaded process and non-blocking
IO to simulate concurrency, instead of the multithreaded or
multi-process implementations of most of the alternatives.  It's one
of the few tools which will usually bottleneck after the server, rather
than before it.

httperf allows more sophisticated testing, including the generation of
simulated 'real-world' workloads. It's available from:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/David_Mosberger/httperf.html

Julian Midgley
-- 
Julian Midgley
Principal Consultant                    jmidgley at zeus.com
Zeus Technology Ltd                     http://www.zeus.com