Load Testing Tool for Web Applications

Load testing is a generic term covering Performance Testing and Stress Testing.

Load testing is a much used industry term for the effort of performance testing. Here load means the number of users or the traffic for the system. Load testing is defined as the testing to determine whether the system is capable of handling anticipated number of users or not.

In Load Testing, the virtual users are simulated to exhibit the real user behavior as much as possible. Even the user think time such as how users will take time to think before inputting data will also be emulated. It is carried out to justify whether the system is performing well for the specified limit of load.

WebLOAD is an open source tool for load testing, stress testing and performance testing that is sponsored by RadView. It can load-test any Internet application, including applications that use Web 2.0 & AJAX. This project is based on twelve years of code development invested in the previously proprietary WebLOAD, the award winning commercial performance testing solution for internet applications from Radview Software. WebLOAD is a great starting point for this project, with a community of more than 1,600 customers and a track record established on the merits of its robust functionality, efficient architecture, extensibility, support, quality and its ease of use.




FunkLoad is a functional and load web tester, written in Python, whose main use cases includes Functional testing of web projects and regression testing as well. It’s also capable of performance testing your app by loading the web application and monitoring your servers which helps to pinpoint bottlenecks, giving a detailed report of performance measurement. FunkLoad also expose bugs that do not surface in cursory testing, like volume testing or longevity testing.




OpenSTA is a distributed software testing architecture designed around CORBA, it was originally developed to be commercial software by CYRANO. The current toolset has the capability of performing scripted HTTP and HTTPS heavy load tests with performance measurements from Win32 platforms. Testing can be performed using the record and replay metaphor common in most other similar commercially available toolsets. Results and statistics are collected during test runs by a variety of automatic and user controlled mechanisms which include scripted timers, SNMP data, Windows Performance Monitor stats and HTTP results & timings.




An open-source tool written in C-language, simulating application load and application behavior of thousands and tens of thousand HTTP/HTTPS and FTP/FTPS clients, each with its own source IP-address. The tool is useful for performance loading of various application services, for testing web and ftp servers and traffic generation. Activities of each virtual client are logged and collected statistics includes information about resolving, connection establishment, sending of requests, receiving responses, headers and data received/sent, errors from network, TLS/SSL and application (HTTP, FTP) level events and errors.





JCrawler is an open-source (under the CPL) Stress-Testing Tool for web-applications. It comes with the crawling/exploratory feature. You can give JCrawler a set of starting URLs and it will begin crawling from that point onwards, going through any URLs it can find on its way and generating load on the web application. The load parameters (hits/sec) are configurable.




Pylot is a free open source tool for testing performance and scalability of web services. It runs HTTP load tests, which are useful for capacity planning, benchmarking, analysis, and system tuning. Pylot generates concurrent load (HTTP Requests) , verifies server responses, and produces reports with metrics. Tests suites are executed and monitored from a GUI.




Sloppy deliberately slows the transfer of data between client and server. Example usage: you probably build web sites on your local network, which is fast. Using Sloppy is one way to get the “dial-up experience” of your work without the hassle of having to install a modem.



WebInject is a free tool for automated testing of web applications and web services. It can be used to test individual system components that have HTTP interfaces (JSP, ASP, CGI, PHP, AJAX, Servlets, HTML Forms, XML/SOAP Web Services, REST, etc), and can be used as a test harness to create a suite of [HTTP level] automated functional, acceptance, and regression tests. A test harness allows you to run many test cases and collect/report your results. WebInject offers real-time results display and may also be used for monitoring system response times. WebInject can be used as a complete test framework that is controlled by the WebInject User Interface (GUI). Optionally, it can be used as a standalone test runner (text/console application) which can be integrated and called from other test frameworks or applications