Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

Wow - I didn't know anyone was using this anymore...

ACT, part of Visual Studio .NET is considerably better, so I am told - what is even more exciting is that Visual Studio 2005 will have a very powerful Load Testing Tool... (see http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/686)...

If a completely free tool is what you need, then I always use OpenSTA (http://www.opensta.org). It is designed for load-testing specialists and has similar capabilities to the commercial-load testing tools... you can see what I mean here: http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/361

The biggest limitation with ACT is that you can't coordinate multiple networked computers to simulate a really high load. The word I got from a Microsoft employee on a newsgroup is that ACT was for developers testing on their own workstation. WAS was still useful for multi-computer load testing.

OpenSTA has a bug where large viewstates in ASPX pages cause it to crash. I know that large viewstates are bad, but we were load-testing a client site and needed perf benchmarks. Almost all the functionality available in OpenSTA I've found somewhere in WAS.

That's interesting... I have used WAS and found that it was quite limited... perhaps I just didn't dig deep enough...

For anyone who is interested, the ViewState/OpenSTA issue and why ViewState is bad can be found on <a href="http://www.stickyminds.com/getfile.asp?ot=XML&id=6462&fn=XDD6462filelistfilename1%2EPDF">StickyMinds</a>

Sorry about that last link... here it is again:
http://www.stickyminds.com/getfile.asp?ot=XML&id=6462&fn=XDD6462filelistfilename1%2EPDF

Antony - yep, I know ViewState at the size that was causing problems (64k) is bad, but we didn't build the app! We were trying to explain to the client *why* it was bad. Heh.

Actually I have used WAS alot and have found it great for simple testing or testing simple apps but OPEN STA is far more powerful as well as more accurate in its collection of information.

i would like to know from where i can download the ACT. can someone of u give the url......thx

ACT comes with Visual Studio .NET.

i wish there is way to separate act from visual studio. net it looks like quite a nice tool

Bob - it's pretty good, but gives you no way to combine multiple computers to hammer on a web server like WAS (or OpenSTA) does.