blog.vorpal.cc

I’m not sure if anyone will notice this, it’s been over a month since my last post…

Anyway, I’m looking for a tool to test a web application’s performance. Specifically I’m looking for something with these features:

• Give it a url of a page and it will load the page, images, css, javascript, css images, and flash files in the order that a browser would.
• Hit the server just like a browser: only 2 connections per user, only 1 javascript file at a time, supports gzip compression.
• Can optionally use the Last-Modified, If-Modified-Since, ETag, and Expires headers on subsequent requests from each user.
• Reports on average time to load the full page.
• Outputs to a basic format like csv or simple xml that I could load into Excel for example.
• Appents to the log so that I could run this once a day and gather stats.
• Can be run from the command line so I could set up an automated process or integrate into the build server.

Things that would be just sweet, but not absolutely required:

• Reports on the time it takes for the user to see a partial page; i.e. layout, links and have loaded, but not necessarily all images or scripts at the end of the page.
• Specific browser independent or can simulate different browsers.
• Simulate many users for stress testing.
• Report total file size of page.
• Open source or at least free.
• Server independent: can test IIS or Apache or Tomcat or whatever.

I’ve been looking around and I haven’t found a lot. A lot of what I’ve found has been incomplete open source projects without any updates since around 2001 and there’s quite a few that are proprietary and won’t even list a price (probably way too expensive.)

Most tools seem to be either throwing as many requests at a server as possible (Microsoft’s ACT), or integration/logic testing (Selenium, WatiN). While these tools are useful and I’ve used them all before, none quite fit what I’m looking for. I also understand the Visual Studio tester edition (or whatever it’s called) has some new tool to replace ACT, but I don’t have that version because apparently I’m just a developer, not a “tester” according to Microsoft.

YSlow‘s stats is close to what I’m looking for, I’d like to be able to record the stats and automate it. ACT can almost do this, but it only records what IE does once, so if I remove a javascript file, or change the modification date, etc. I have to recreate the test. Plus it records requests per second, when I’m more interested in average page load time.

Anyway, I figured I’d just throw the question out there. If I can’t find anything, I may start a small command line C# project to do it.