Performance testing and measurement tools

These tools fall under two broad categories—namely, the ones used for performance testing and diagnostics, and the ones used for performance metrics gathering and instrumentation.

Performance testing and diagnostic tools can be classified further as follows:

• Stress-testing tools: These tools are used to supply workload to the system under test, simulating peak workloads in production. These tools can be configured to send a continuous stream of input to the application to simulate high stress or to periodically send a burst of very high traffic—much exceeding even peak stress—to test the robustness of the system. These tools are also called load generators. Examples of common stress testing tools used for web application testing include httpperf, ApacheBench, LoadRunner, Apache JMeter, and Locust. Another class of tools involves those that actually record real user traffic and then replay it via the network to simulate real user...