Load testing is the process of putting your website or application under heavy load to determine if it can handle the demand. This is important when you are scaling up your website infrastructure. Load testing requires heavy hardware resources, which many large businesses can afford, but when you are starting out on a smaller scale it makes sense to save some money when possible. Fortunately there are some free tools available for load testing including JMeter, DripStat and WebSockets Playground.
If you’re a performance freak and your website is not performing well, then you might need to load test your website to find what’s causing the problem. In this article, we’ll look at some of the free load testing tools available in the market to help you find optimization opportunities for your website. We’ll also explore how these tools can be helpful in diagnosing performance problems. Let’s get started!
JMeter
JMeter is the most popular open-source tool in the performance space to help measure load time.
Apache JMeter describes itself as a Java application that was designed specifically for load testing with the ability to measure application performance and response times.
JMeter was built to pretty much be the open-source alternative to LoadRunner, so you’ll find it has lots of sophisticated features. It’s a thick client Java app that’s largely driven by right clicks. It’s a little weird, but it’s got a lot of power. Also, all the features a professional load tester wants are available on JMeter.
Some features are:
- The ability to performance test a host of technologies using a range of protocols such as Java Objects, Web HTTP/HTTPS, SOAP and Rest Services, FTP, Databases with JDBC
- A nice IDE you can use for recording, building, and debugging your performance tests
- Starting with JMeter 3.1 Groovy is the default programming language
- One of the more popular performance testing tools
- Can configure it to help test mobile performance of mobile apps
It currently has 5.1k stars on GitHub.
Although JMeter is one of the more popular test tools, it does have some shortcomings.
For instance, JMeter can be a bit difficult to scale for a large distributed test; especially if you have to set up a bunch of machines since you have to configure them to talk to each other. There is also a host of orchestrating problems in executing large JMeter tests.
That’s where a tool open sourced by BlazeMeter—Taurus—can help you out.
ReadyAPI Performance
SmartBear offers an all-in-one automated API Testing Platform called ReadyAPI. It contains various tools like Swagger & SwaggerHub, SoapUI NG, ReadyAPI Performance, Secure Pro, ServiceV, and AlertSite.
ReadyAPI Performance is an API tool for load testing. This API testing tool will assure you that your APIs can perform anywhere. It will let you install load agents on any server or cloud as well as on-premise. It provides advanced performance metrics for load test runs.
SoapUI NG is a tool for functional testing and you can use these functional testing use cases designed in the SOAPUI for performance testing.
This load testing tool will help you with testing the speed, scalability, and performance of the APIs, Servers, and Network Resources. It has features of flexible load generation, parallel API load tests, server monitoring, and pre-built load templates.
WebLOAD
WebLOAD is an enterprise-scale load testing solution capable of generating reliable, real life load scenarios, even for the most complex systems, with smart analytics providing performance insights.
WebLOAD is based on a flexible platform with built in support for hundreds of technologies and integration with many tools from CI/CD pipelines to monitoring.
WebLOAD Features:
- WebLOAD is offered on the Cloud (SAAS) or as an On-Prem deployment
- Flexible test scenario creation
- Smart Scripting based native JavaScript with Powerful correlation, parametrization and validation engines
- Supports every major web technology and easily extendible
- Automatic bottleneck detection
- Easy-to-reach customer support
Taurus
While not technically a load testing tool Taurus acts more like a wrapper on top of other solutions that hides the complexity of running performance tests.
The power of Taurus is that it allows you to write your tests in YAML.
You can actually describe a full-blown script in about ten lines of text, which gives teams the ability to describe their tests in a YAML or JSON file. The YAML is a human, readable, edible approach that enables you to describe a test in a simple text file.
This is a big leap forward from the old days of having to bring up a big, heavy vendor-specific record and scripting tool for load time measuring.
Features
- This should also allow more members of your team to contribute to performance tests. Also, since your test cases are written in YAML the tests are much more readable, making them easier to perform code reviews on.
- Taurus basically fits performance testing into your CI/CD pipeline much more efficiently.
- Taurus provides a sort of abstraction layer on top of JMeter, as well as some other tools like Locust, Gatling, the Grinder and Selenium.
StormForge
StormForge offers fast and accurate enterprise-grade Performance-Testing-as-a-Service.
It is the only platform that combines performance testing with machine-learning powered optimization which allows users to both understand the performance and automatically identify the ideal configurations of the application for performance and resource utilization.
Use StormForge to load test your applications for performance and availability at scale before you release them to production. Create load tests in just three minutes and scale from tens to hundreds of thousands of requests per second, and even millions of concurrent users.
Easily create repeatable, automated load tests to incorporate into your CI/CD workflow. Capture actual production traffic to ensure that your load testing reflects actual traffic patterns.
Benefits:
- Shift performance is left to ensure performance and reliability before release.
- Improve user experience by ensuring application performance under load to meet SLAs and minimize business-impacting issues.
- Reduce risk and release with confidence by ensuring deployment success by testing with real-world scenarios before releasing new code into production.
- Build a culture of performance by empowering DevOps teams to build load testing into the CI/CD process to proactively ensure performance and reliability.
- Cut your cloud costs, cloud waste, lower your cloud bills, and improve your performance, guaranteed. StormForge guarantees a minimal reduction of Kubernetes cloud applications.
Conclusion
If you’ve been involved in web development for any amount of time, you’ll know that one question keeps getting asked over and over again – what tools should I use to test my application? Is it JMeter or Selenium? Is it a paid for service or something free?