Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

Sponsors

The Lounge

Syndication

Recent Posts

Tags

View more

News

  • Darrell Norton pic

    MVP logo

    View Darrell Norton's profile on LinkedIn

    Currently Reading:

    weewar.com

.NET User Group

Articles

Archives

Advertisement

Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP] » Web Application Stress tool tutorial
Images in this post missing? We recently lost them in a site migration. We're working to restore these as you read this. Should you need an image in an emergency, please contact us at imagehelp@codebetter.com
Web Application Stress tool tutorial

Here is a very good tutorial on using Microsoft’s Web Application Stress (WAS) tool.

Posted 09-15-2004 6:47 AM by Darrell Norton

[Advertisement]

Comments

Antony Marcano wrote re: Web Application Stress tool tutorial
on 09-15-2004 9:58 AM
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

Darrell wrote re: Web Application Stress tool tutorial
on 09-15-2004 10:34 AM
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.
Antony Marcano wrote re: Web Application Stress tool tutorial
on 09-19-2004 10:25 AM
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>
Antony Marcano wrote re: Web Application Stress tool tutorial
on 09-19-2004 10:26 AM
Darrell wrote re: Web Application Stress tool tutorial
on 09-19-2004 1:57 PM
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.
robi sen wrote re: Web Application Stress tool tutorial
on 10-06-2004 7:42 AM
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.
sarah wrote re: Web Application Stress tool tutorial
on 11-23-2004 10:31 PM
i would like to know from where i can download the ACT. can someone of u give the url......thx
Darrell wrote re: Web Application Stress tool tutorial
on 11-24-2004 2:47 AM
ACT comes with Visual Studio .NET.
bob wrote re: Web Application Stress tool tutorial
on 01-31-2005 3:23 PM
i wish there is way to separate act from visual studio. net it looks like quite a nice tool
Darrell wrote re: Web Application Stress tool tutorial
on 02-01-2005 6:44 AM
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.