Mike Radomski

Benchmark Tools: Part II – Application Testing

January 29, 2008 · 3 Comments

In Part I – Disk I/O, we discussed two standalone tools to measure disk performance. In Part II, I hope to present some viable tools to measure the performance of your web applications and Oracle databases. My organization is continuously being asked to size and architect systems to run various applications. We use a couple of tools to perform load tests for SCT Banner and other applications we host.

The most common tools we use are:

  • BadBoy
  • jMeter
  • SwingBench

BadBoy is …

a powerful tool designed to aid in testing and development of complex dynamic applications. Badboy makes web testing and development easier with dozens of features including a simple yet comprehensive capture/replay interface, powerful load testing support, detailed reports, graphs and much more!

Best of all, Badboy is Cheap or FREE depending on your use (Read the license agreement to learn more)

BadBoy is a browser recording tool that can output jMeter test files.

jMeter is …

a 100% pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions.

Apache JMeter may be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more). It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types. You can use it to make a graphical analysis of performance or to test your server/script/object behavior under heavy concurrent load.

We use BadBoy to record and create scripts that are then used as input test files in jMeter. jMeter’s wiki has a link to a step-by-step tutorial entitled Test your Web Application’s Performance on how to use BadBoy and jMeter. With this method, we have worked with our member campuses to produce a significant registration load for SCT Banner.

Swingbench is …

a free load generator (and benchmarks) designed to stress test an Oracle database (9i,10g,11g).

Our DBAs use Swingbench to stress Oracle databases. Swingbench has proven a useful, cross-platform tool to stress standalone databases and RAC databases. It has a very pretty looking, real time interface.

Benchmark Tools Series:

Categories: Benchmark Tools · Linux · Oracle · Technology · Unix · Virtualization

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