While working on performance testing of an .net application I got the opportunity to test out some open source tools. The ones discussed here are free and can be used for load testing. There are tons of paid load/performance testing tools, both open source and closed source, but this article specifically covers free testing tools. This article also discusses simple steps for performing load testing using each of these tools using a sample application.
The tools listed in this article are open source load testing tools for .net application. Some of these tool are completely free to use, while some are paid.
Kinsta APM
Need a hassle-free performance monitoring solution for your WordPress website? Try Kinsta APM. It’s designed to let you find and resolve performance issues on your Kinsta-hosted sites. With a simple and easy-to-use UI, Kinsta APM is for everyone, whether they’re beginners to experts. Plus, it’s available in 10 languages under MyKinsta.
Kinsta APM provides insights on slow PHP transactions, external requests, MySQL queries, and more. You can debug database queries, non-optimized themes or plugins, and longer API calls and external URL requests, along with identifying slowest, median, and average transactions.
It’s helpful for everyone, from agencies and ecommerce site owners to developers, by helping them find and troubleshoot performance issues quickly while reducing their expenditure on costly APM tools.
Features and Benefits:
- Customer support team: With over ten years of experience, Kinsta’s seasoned customer support team will resolve all your site issues with 24/7 availability and a 100% solve rate. You can chat with them directly through MyKinsta and get instant replies.
- Pricing: The tool is free for every website that Kinsta hosts, no matter what plan you’ve chosen. You can also book a live demo to test the performance yourself.
WebLOAD
Released in 1997, WebLOAD by RadView is a performance and load testing tool for your software and helps you scale your business. It offers capabilities like performance, integrity, and scalability testing.
This enterprise-grade tool is capable of simulating thousands of users concurrently so you can test heavy traffic loads and report weak points, constraints, and performance bottlenecks in your application.
Use WebLOAD for website load testing, continuous testing, cloud load testing, and more. The tool can generate load from the cloud or on-premise machines and offers an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for recording, editing, debugging test scripts visually.
Its proxy-based recorder also records your HTTP activities and generates tests in JavaScript. You can also edit or enhance it using multiple tools in IDE. WebLOAD offers analysis reports for performance data that help users to identify bottlenecks.
Features and Benefits
- Correlation: Correlates dynamic values automatically like session IDs and enables scripts to execute with different virtual clients.
- Protocol support: Supports HTTPS, HTTP, and XML.
- Integration: Integrates with tools such as Selenium, Jenkins, etc.
- Customer support team: You can reach out to them via phone call, fax, or contact form.
- Pricing: There is a free trial option available for up to 50 users. Contact their team to get a quote.
Apache JMeter
Next up on the list is a famous load testing tool: Apache JMeter. Apache JMeter helps you measure and analyze software performance. It’s an open source tool based on Java that people use mainly for testing web app performance, but it also finds usage on other services.
It can test performance for both dynamic and static resources, as well as dynamic web apps. In addition, you can use it to simulate heavy loads over a server, network/object, or group of different servers to test its strength and analyze total performance under varying load types.
The tool is easy to use and doesn’t demand highly sophisticated infrastructure for testing, and is compatible with many load injectors manageable with one controller. Plus, it has a user-friendly GUI that needs less scripting compared to other load testing tools. Its simple graphs and charts are enough to analyze primary load-related data and resource utilization stats.
Its fully-featured IDE allows faster testing creation, recording, and debugging. JMeter supports CLI to load the performance test from an OS compatible with Java, including Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, etc.
Features and Benefits
- Protocol support: HTTPS, HTTP, SAOP, XML, FTP, etc.
- Supported technologies: PHP, NodeJS, ASP.NET, database, MOM, LDAP, Java objects, TCP, etc.
- Correlation: offers effortless correlation and lets you extract data from top response formats like HTML, XML, JSON, etc.
- Extensibility: It’s highly extensible and works with pluggable samplers, scriptable samples like Groovy, pluggable timers, data visualization, and analysis plugins, and more.
- Integration: Integrates with open source libraries such as Jenkins, Gradle, Maven, etc.
- Customer support: They have a large community of developers and contributors with whom you can interact. They also have maintained tutorials so you can understand the tool better.
- Pricing: JMeter is free and open source.
LoadNinja
Create your load tests and run them quickly using LoadNinja by SmartBear. It helps you diagnose app performance issues with highly accurate and actionable data. It provides results that are easy to read and doesn’t need extensive programming.
This tool helps product teams, testers, and engineers focus on building their software that scales while spending less time creating test scripts.
LoadNinja allows you to record client-side interactions, identify performance issues quickly, and debug in real-time without sacrificing test quality by eliminating script scrubbing, translation, and dynamic correlation efforts. With its TrueLoad technology, it’ll also let you test the actual end-user experience on multiple browsers to save more than 60% of your effort. It is highly efficient and precise in recording load tests, and it replays them instantly with no coding needed.
Analyze software performance data such as strep times, asynchronous calls, processed resources, navigation timings on your web interface, and diagnose issues using a machine learning assistant.
Perform continuous software performance testing, move faster with quality and test coverage, and automate the tests. It requires no setup or maintenance as the service is cloud-based.
Note: SmartBear offered a similar offering previously called LoadComplete. While it’s still available to use, it hasn’t been updated since 2019. We recommend you avoid it.
Features and Benefits
- Integration: Automated tests by using their custom CI/CD plugins or REST API.
- Customer Support: You can reach out to the LoadNinja user community to find answers or go through their comprehensive documentation and FAQs.
- Pricing: The entry price of this tool is $1,439/year for 100 virtual users and 100 load hours.
Loadero
Loadero is a cloud-based performance and load testing tool that allows you to create faster performance tests and find system issues efficiently.
You can use Selenium, write test scripts in Java, JavaScript, or Python to conduct large-scale load testing or performance tests, and record web sessions for performing debugging. Configure the test by adding test users, groping, browser, location, counterfeit data feeds, network conditions, and more.
Loadero lets you set up multiple network settings and test your software in different network conditions. The cloud infrastructure of Loadero offers better scalability without letting you worry about maintenance.
This performance testing tool also helps you detect system limitations with comprehensive performance test reports, machine statistics, load times, screenshots, and recordings. In addition, Loadero features built-in validations to execute assertions automatically after the completion of the test run.
Features and Benefits
- Browser support: Loadero supports the five latest Google Chrome versions along with Mozilla Firefox.
- Reusable test codes: It lets you utilize the existing test setup to run load testing.
- Fake media: You can incorporate artificial media feed and simulate microphone and webcam inputs.
- Worldwide coverage: Perform tests from any of their 12 global locations.
- Pricing: It costs $250/month under the pay-as-you-go model.
Load Testing
Load testing determines how the software performs with the increase in workload in a given time. This workload can be concurrent users, the number of transactions, software behavior, etc.
It aims at observing the response time, throughput rates, resource utilization, and more. By identifying any performance bottlenecks in these attributes, you can troubleshoot them before launching the application to ensure a better end-user experience.
Thanks to load testing, developers can understand how many concurrent users a software application can handle at a given time.
Endurance Testing
Also called soak testing, endurance testing evaluates the performance of the software over an extended period under a regular, fixed workload. In other words, it determines how long the software can endure a constant workload to provide long-term sustainability.
During this testing, test teams monitor KPIs like memory leaks, memory usage, memory shortages, and more. Endurance testing also analyzes response times and throughput after prolonged use to display whether these metrics are consistent or not.
Stress Testing
Stress testing measures software performance beyond the normal working parameters. It means the software is placed under higher traffic loads (more users, transactions, etc.) to help developers learn how well the software performs above its capacity limits expectedly.
The goal of this testing is to determine the software’s stability. It helps you understand the point at which the software fails and how it recovers from the failure. It strains hardware resources like CPU, memory, disk space, etc., to measure the application’s breaking point based on resource utilization.
Example: Companies perform stress testing before some major events like Black Friday to check the performance of their ecommerce applications.
Spike Testing
Spike testing is a type of stress testing that measures software performance under a significant and sudden ‘spike’ or increasing workload like simulated users. It tells you whether the software can handle that abrupt increase of workload repeatedly and rapidly.
Volume Testing
During the development phase, only a small amount of data is used to test code. Volume testing (also called ‘flood testing’) tests how efficient the software is when subjected to large volumes of data. It checks for data loss, system response time, data storage reliability, and more.
Scalability Testing
Scalability testing measures how effective the software is in handling an increasing amount of workload. The test will tell you its behavior when you scale up or down the performance attributes of the software.
You can perform scalability testing by adding data volume or users gradually while monitoring the software’s performance.
Conclusion
There are many tools available for performance testing on the internet. It’s hard to decide which one will suit your needs best. We have put together this list of open source performance testing tools to help you get the results you need without breaking the bank. What are you waiting for? Get Started!