Tools for Ajax load testing

Question

There seems to be a lot of stress/load testing tool that support AJAX.
I am wondering how well does these tool implemented.

Do they only record http request and repl

Answer 1

If you don't want to setup your own load testing server there are a couple of free online load testing services that can run load tests directly over the Internet. For example http://loadimpact.com or http://loadstorm.com

Answer 2

I've used Virtual User Generator, which is a part of the Loadrunner software from HP, to test AJAX applications. The software has several application protocols that can be used to record web applications, e.g. AJAX, and Click and Script.

For the majority of web application load testing it is sufficient to record and replay http requests. This will give the result of how the servers are handling the load. If your web application does a lot of asynchronous loading, and rendering on the client side, e.g. parsing large datasets of xml or json, or many DOM modifications, it can be relevant to include the browser tier to measure the end user experience.

Answer 3

Better write isolated test method or API for load testing ajax application. There are some reasons:

• It's not so easy to write functional tests to Ajax applications, for example for GWT.
• You can use Jmeter WebDriver plugin, but for each run it starts browser which will use most of RAM and CPU.
• You will load backend not frontend, so you can avoid ajax.

You can devide your testing like that: for Ajax application use Selenium or PhantomJS/CasperJS. For load testing use JMeter, Gatling via API not via Ajax.

Answer 4

Google apps are written in GWT, which comes with its own extension to JUnit. Article on unit testing ajax applications with GWT.

Answer 5

Take a look at LoadBooster(https://www.loadbooster.com). It utilizes headless scriptable browser PhantomJS/CasperJs to test web sites. Phantomjs will parse and render every page, execute the client-side script. The headless browser approach is easier to write test scenarios to support complex AJAX heavy Web 2.0 app，browser navigation, mouse click and keystrokes into the browser or wait until an element exists in DOM. LoadBooster support selenium HTML script too.

Disclaimer: I work for LoadBooster.

Answer 6

I've used SilkPerformer at a previous job. According to the link, they have some AJAX enhancements. Unfortunately, Silk is far from free.