WebBench
HREF recommends that you use the FREE WebBench utility
from ZDLabs to stress-test your web server and its
applications in order to determine your system capacity.
This page outlines instructions and tips.
- Download:
http://www.zdnet.com/zdbop/webbench/webbench.html
- Read the excellent manual and follow the instructions for
installing the Controller, the Client, and the test
files on the server.
Other Choices
Recommended by Randy Bratton at SecureTax:
Microsoft's WCAT and Orville programs.
Orville is on the IIS Resource Kit and WCAT might be.
They may both be on Microsoft's web site also.
WAS from Microsoft
Christian recommends "Web Application Stress Tool" from Microsoft,
rather than INetLoad. "...more powerful, and in comparsion,
it creates reports on the test where INetLoad only provides you with some
real-time statistics which isn't really useful. Another nice thing is that
you can add performance counters (same as Performance Monitor) which can set an
update interval on. It seemed more stable, with that I mean that I had a
feeling that INetLoad sometimes had trouble, resulting in many errors. But
that could also be because I set a lower load here. But even if I set a
lower load here, it seems like it gave around the same load as INetLoad. It
is not perfect, but I find it so far superior to INetLoad. I also believe it
has some more powerful features which I havn't checked out."
To download, goto
http://webtool.rte.microsoft.com
Microsoft INetLoad
http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/inetload/inetload.htm
Simple stress test utility, seems a bit unstable (see below). Ok to use if you want to put some load on your site, all it gives you are some simple statistics about how many page requests, number of errors, etc.... But if it reports any error, the simple utility starts to show it weakness as it doesn't give you a list of which errors. Sometimes the load dropped to zero, and it took secounds before any new request. That could be caused by the webserver as well as INetLoad.
Perf. Testing: Instructions for Testing a Site