Good, less expensive load testing tool

Currently our company is using LoadRunner for our load testing needs. It works great and does the job well for us. However, the fees they are wanting to charge us for another license is phenominally large (5x higher than our 1st license, 200k+). Are there any other REALLY good load testing tools out there that are fair in their pricing? I'm aware of SilkPerformer (and its fairly large cost too).

Any real world experience and insight is helpful!

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Permalink Reply by Brent Strange on January 22, 2008 at 2:55pm: No, we haven't done any negotiation. We were just so appalled at the quote that we decided to explore other options.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by John Overbaugh on January 22, 2008 at 5:21am: Brent,

We have been using jmeter for our testing on http://www.lds.org and related public-facing properties, but from my first day (Aug 2007) I didn't trust it.Just took time to prove it unreliable. We are slowly migrating our perf testing to WAPT (creatively named Web Application Performance Testing tool). Available as free download (trial) from http://www.loadtestingtool.com.

It's powerful (a core-duo Intel w/2 GB RAM can drive 4x the usage as JMeter), and has fantastic built-in stat graphing and the likes. One draw back - cannot use Apache logs for replaying conditions (bummer about that one, believe me...). Another bummer is that it requires scripting.

But the app is powerful, rather configurable (unless you want to globally search and replace port values, which we do when moving our tests from staging to prod), and overall quite useful for it's price.Very low learnng curve.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Brent Strange on January 22, 2008 at 2:54pm: Thanks John. We'll take a look at WAPT.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Jared Quinert on February 6, 2008 at 9:11pm: Hi Brent,

You probably need to clarify which particular protocols you need to support. If it's web-only, I'm sure you have quite a few options.

And re-reading the above, you probably also need to clarify what 'REALLY good' means to you :); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Dean Cornish on February 11, 2008 at 4:51am: While I liked using jmeter, especially with badboy, the big problem I had at a previous employer, was that it flat out doesnt work with .NET applications.
Firstly, .NET apps frequently change their page ID's which will stop scripts lasting any amount of time.
The second is that .NET stores authentication information in variables that are difficult to get at with jmeter, it can be done but not reliably in my view.
I think Jmeter is a good tool, it just doesnt do much in the way of automation or showing nice reports.. it gives you nitty gritty details which arent good for all shops.

I'd be interested in hearing how you go with WAPT please let us know how it goes :); ▶ Reply to This