Performance testing is one of the most important things you can do for your application. It will help uncover performance issues in your code, or with third-party services you depend on. If not applied properly, it can put undue strain on the infrastructure of your application and produce misleading results. Performance testing shouldn’t be limited to just performance engineers either, it’s an integral part of any development process. You need to properly plan how you are going to test your application so your team doesn’t run into problems down the road.
In this article we will share some approaches to consider when designing a load testing process, as well as highlight some free online tools available so you can get started right away.
Eggplant – Performance and load testing to ensure responsive and scalable application experiences for your app
Eggplant Performance provides user-centric performance testing that’s simple to use with the unique ability to simulate virtual users at both the application UI and the network protocol levels, making it a solution that gives you an understanding of the UX impact at scale.
Usability is perhaps the most satisfying element of the eggplant experience, as it is relatively easy to pick up and run with as a new user. The software scored favorably in the Usability category of the review criteria outlined previously.
A few cons to note are 1) the tool, on occasion, reports false positives since it works based on the OCR engine, and 2) it works better on macOS than on Windows.
Eggplant starts at $3400 for one test stream and has a free demo. Visit Website.
LoadNinja
LoadNinja by SmartBear allows you to quickly create scriptless sophisticated load tests, reduces testing time by 50%, replaces load emulators with real browsers, and get actionable, browser-based metrics, all at ninja speed.
You can easily capture client-side interactions, debug in real-time, and identify performance problems immediately. LoadNinja empowers teams to increase their test coverage without sacrificing quality by removing the tedious efforts of dynamic correlation, script translation, and script scrubbing.
With LoadNinja, engineers, testers and product teams can focus more on building apps that scale and focus less on building load testing scripts.
Features:
- Scriptless load test creation & playback with InstaPlay recorder.
- Real browser load test execution at scale.
- VU Debugger – debug tests in real-time.
- VU Inspector – manage virtual user activity in real-time.
- Hosted on the cloud, no server machine & upkeep required.
- Sophisticated browser-based metrics with analytics and reporting features.
=> Click Here To Get A Free LoadNinja Trial
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.=> Visit ReadyAPI Performance Website
LoadView
LoadView is a fully managed, on-demand load testing tool that allows complete hassle-free load and stress testing.
Unlike many other load testing tools, LoadView performs testing in real browsers (not headless phantom browsers), which provides extremely accurate data, closely emulating real users. You only pay for what you use and no contracts are required. LoadView is 100% cloud-based, scalable, and can be deployed in minutes.
Advanced Load Testing Features include Point and Click Scripting, Global Cloud-Based Infrastructure, Real Browser Testing=>Load Testing by LoadView
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.
=> Get Started With StormForge For Free
Keysight’s Eggplant
Keysight’s Eggplant Software is an open, extensible, and multi-protocol performance testing solution. It is designed for new challenges. It performs end-to-end testing and can test anything and everything. It addresses technology glitches.
Eggplant Software provides the benefits of testing faster & efficiently, reducing IT costs, automating repetitive tasks, performing test maintenance at a scale, and reducing time-to-market.
Features:
- Eggplant is simple to use and can perform true, user-centric performance testing.
- It can simulate virtual users at application UI as well as network protocol levels. This feature provides a true understanding of the UX impact at scale.
- It performs intelligent test executions by auto-generating and auto-maintaining test assets.
- It has effective analysis and reporting capabilities.
=> Visit Keysight’s Eggplant Website
Apache JMeter
Open source load testing tool: It is a Java platform application. It is mainly considered as a performance testing tool and it can also be integrated with the test plan. In addition to the load test plan, you can also create a functional test plan.
This tool has the capacity to be loaded into a server or network so as to check on its performance and analyze its working under different conditions. Initially, it was introduced to test web applications, but later its scope had widened.
It is of great use in testing the functional performance of resources such as Servlets, Perl Scripts and JAVA objects. Need JVM 1.4 or higher to run.
System Requirements: It works under Unix and Windows OS
Official Website: Apache JMeter
Micro Focus LoadRunner
This is a Micro Focus product which can be used as a Performance Testing tool. This can be bought as a Micro Focus product from its Micro Focus software division. Also, it is very much useful in understanding and determining the performance and outcome of the system when there is an actual load.
One of the key attractive features of this testing tool is that it can create and handle thousands of users at the same time.
This tool enables you to gather all the required information with respect to the performance and is also based on the infrastructure. LoadRunner comprises of different tools – namely, Virtual User Generator, Controller, Load Generator and Analysis.
System Requirements: Microsoft Windows and Linux are the favorable OS for this measuring tool.
Official Website: LoadRunner
Rational Performance Tester
Rational performance tester is an automated performance testing tool that can be used for a web application or a server-based application where the process of input and output is involved. This tool creates a demo of the original transaction process between the user and the web service.
By the end of it, all the statistical information is gathered and they are analyzed to increase efficiency. Any leakage on the website or the server can be identified and rectified immediately with the help of this tool.
This tool can be the best option for building an effective and error-free cloud computing service. This Rational Performance tester was developed by IBM (Rational software division). They have come up with many versions of this automated testing tool.
System Requirement: Microsoft Windows and Linux AIX are good enough for this performance testing tool.
Official Website: Rational Performance Tester
NeoLoad
NeoLoad is the most automated performance testing platform for enterprise organizations that continuously test applications and APIs. NeoLoad provides testers and developers automatic test design and maintenance, the most realistic simulation of user behavior, fast root cause analysis and built-in integrations with the entire SDLC toolchain.
NeoLoad lets you reuse and share test assets and results from functional testing tools to analytics and metrics from APM tools. NeoLoad supports a full range of mobile, web and packaged applications, like SAP, to cover all testing needs.
Continuously schedule, manage and share test resources and results across the organization to ensure application performance.
System Requirements: This tool is compatible with operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
Official Website: NeoLoad
LoadComplete
Easy and affordable performance testing tool. LoadComplete enables you to create and execute realistic load tests for websites and web apps. It automates creating realistic load tests by recording user interactions and simulating these actions with hundreds of virtual users either from your local computers or from the cloud.
LoadComplete helps you check your web server’s performance under a massive load, determine its robustness and estimate its scalability. It also provides detailed metrics and reports that help you gain in-depth insights into infrastructure performance, application behavior, and end-user experience.
System requirements: This tool works on 64-bit operating systems such as Windows XP Professional and Windows 7 or later.
Official Website: LoadComplete
WAPT
Performance Testing tool for websites and intranet applications: WAPT refers to the Web Application Performance tool. These are the scales or analyzing tools for measuring the performance and output of any web application or web related interfaces.
These tools help us to measure the performance of any web services, web applications or any other web interfaces. With this tool, you have the advantage of testing the web application performance under different environments and different load conditions.
WAPT provides detailed information about virtual users and their output to its users during load testing. This is considered to be the most cost-effective tool for analyzing the performance of web services.
The WAPT tool can test the web application on its compatibility with the browser and operating system. It is also used for testing the compatibility with the windows application in certain cases.
WAPT System Requirement: Windows OS is required for this testing tool.
Official Website: WAPT.
Conclusion
When it comes time to start load testing your website you will probably spend some time looking around the internet to see what is available. There are probably more tools available than you can even imagine. This is because so many companies are using them on their websites. It’s becoming easier than ever to test your website for performance.