Performance testing is essential before the release. The main purpose of performance testing is to verify performance, functionality, reliability or scalability of application. Performance testing is also helpful to understand bottlenecks in the software application. There are many performance testing tools available for this purpose.
This article will discuss about some popular performance testing tools for desktop applications.
Webpagetest
WebPageTest is my favorite website performance tool for quickly testing what is wrong with a slow loading site. The tool includes waterfall charts, compression and caching testing. Best of all you can run both initial and repeat views as well as run multiple tests to average out results.
Waterfall charts break down each individual component so you can spot what’s slowing down your site.
GTMetrix
This is another excellent tool similar to the one above. Many people like it because you get your Google PageSpeed Grade and your Yslow Grades. This can make it easy to show improvements to clients. I recommend this tool if you are mainly looking to improve front-end performance.
Gomez
This tool has been around for ages, but is very useful if you need to test from multiple locations. There’s probably more than 100 locations available to choose from.
https://www.gomeznetworks.com/custom/instant_test.html
FeedTheBot
Relatively new with tons of features. They like to break tests down into small parts. The results are very similar to Google’s page speed but the layout and ease of use is great.
They link each poor test result to an explanation about why it is important. This is great when you have to explain an issue to someone not familiar with web site performance optimization.
Google Page Speed Insights
They provide both mobile and desktop testing. Interestingly, they default to the mobile view. More and more people consume content on mobile devices, so make sure your site is mobile ready.
Dotcom Monitor
Test your site’s performance from 20 locations with just one click. I like this tool because it does full browser testing – not just a HTTP get request like some other tools. They include waterfall charts from all 20 locations! This is great if you have customer complaining about slow site speeds but you cannot replicate the issue. Sometimes network issues can wreck a site’s performance but make it difficult for you to detect without monitoring from multiple locations.
Alertra
Alertra’s SpotCheck tool is great to get a quick up or down response from multiple locations. I often use this to quickly test sites when clients report issues. Generally if Alertra’s test show no issues the problem is highly isolated to a specific region or something specific to the customer’s actions.
Page Speed Online
Google’s Page Speed Online — which is a web-based adaptation of the popular Google Chrome web development browser extension, Page Speed — analyzes your website’s performance under Google’s Web Performance Best Practices (a set of rules for optimal front-end performance). You can gain lots of information from this handy web tool – it even includes a report for mobile device best practices for optimal performance.
Pingdom Tools
Pingdom provides excellent monitoring services but they also include a free full page performance testing tool. The main report is a waterfall view your sites load times. They also include some scoring. This performance tool runs very quickly, so you don’t wait long for the results.
Also, I find the report layout easy to use. They make it very easy to grab response headers on a per HTTP request basis. This can be beneficial if you are fine tuning HTTP response headers to improve performance.
This free online website speed-testing tool by Pingdom (a server, network and website monitoring service) provides you with several reports such as a breakdown of how long each web page object (e.g. images, style sheets and JavaScript libraries) takes to download and performance grades for things like browser caching. Another useful report is a page analysis that provides information on load time, page size and requests.
Free Website Performance Test (BrowserMob)
This free website speed and performance testing tool by BrowserMob, a company that offers website load testing and monitoring service, gives you a ton of information about your web page speed such as average load time, total page weight and number of page objects. It pings your web page from four locations so that you can get a global view of your website’s performance.
Which loads faster?
This interesting tool pits two websites against each other in terms of loading time; for example, you can find out if Google loads faster than Bing does by using this tool. This can be a simple tool for comparing whether your website performs better or worse than competing sites. This open source tool (view the source on GitHub) was originally created to promote the importance of web performance.
WebPagetest
This nifty online tool tests your web page’s rendering speed in real browsers (Chrome, Firefox and IE) and gives you a choice of conducting the test from several locations around the world. It also has advanced settings with options for simulating common Internet connection speeds (e.g. DSL and 56K dial up) and ad-blocking so you can see the performance cost of running ads on your site.
Web Page Analyzer
This simple web page speed test analyzer — probably one of the oldest tools out there with its first version released in 2003 — gives you data on your web page’s size, assets and load time. It also supplies you with recommendations on things you can make better.
Keycdn
Keycdn’s free testing tool allows you to see how your site speed is performing in different locations across the globe.
SiteSpeed
This web-based website speed testing tool displays relevant data on page-rendering time, such as total download time, number of connections made and number of requests made. It also has some bonus features such as being able to run the test even if the web page has HTTP authentication (simply supply it with the password to the page) and the ability to simulate different types of Internet connections.
K6
K6’s free online load testing and performance tool gives you plenty of data on your website’s ability to handle website traffic. This online web performance evaluation tool has the ability to show graphed data such as user load time (simulated by an automated virtual machine) and requests per second (helpful for seeing how durable your web server is and how fast it can handle web page requests).
10. OctaGate SiteTimer
OctaGate SiteTimer is a rather straightforward online tool: you plug in the URL you want to test and, in turn, it will output a bar graph featuring all web page objects containing information such as download start times, end times and duration for each. This tool is beneficial for quickly discovering slow-loading page objects so that you can optimize them to improve website speed.
Load Impact
Load Impact provides load testing and monitoring. You can get a free basic test or sign up for more in-depth testing. They will test from multiple locations and then deliver a report about your site’s performance. The metrics are very details and from multiple locations. This is probably one of the better free, mulitple-location web performance testing tools.
RedBot
This is a great little tool to check HTTP headers. You would be surprised at how many websites have poorly formed headers. Bad headers can ruin caching, CDN effectiveness and even cause the wrong pages to show to mobile browsers. I use this tool to easily show customers what headers are being sent by their site. If the headers are being set by the application, they can then forward this to their developers to get the issue resolved.
Uptrends
This basically provides a quick check of your sites download time from 30+ locations. Will not allow you to dig into deeper web performance issues but can certainly help spot network issues that are impacting page load times.
OctaGate Site Time
Sometime simplicity is key. OctaGate SiteTimer is a very quick waterfall chart generator. Could be useful if you are having to test and re-test.
Neustar Ultratools
A collection of tools for hosting speed checks, DNS checks and more. They keep moving things around and adding/removing features.
IntoDns.com
While not a website performance testing tool, if your DNS is broken, your site may be too. Be sure to check any subdomains used for CDNs or other content on your site.
ManageWP
This is not a general performance tool but a tool we use. You can manage multiple WP sites from a single location. This is vital if security and performance are important to you. So instead of logging into dozens of WP dashboards, you have all of your info in one place.
Conclusion
Apache JMeter™ is an open source performance testing tool for web applications. It was designed to offer load testing, functional testing and Saas testing capabilities for Java, .Net and PHP applications. After more than 15 years of development, JMeter is still the powerhouse tool in terms of flexibility and extensibility.