Software testing load testing tutorials and videos

Spike Testing vs Performance and Load Testing

Software Testing Magazine — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:31:56 +0000

If you ask two software testers, you will get three different definitions for each software testing term. This article discusses the spike testing activity and how this type of testing relates to and differs from performance and load testing. Author: Franco Martinig, Martinig & Associates Some Software Testing Definitions Spike, performance and load testing are three types of tests used to assess non-functional capabilities of the applications and websites under test, mainly on the server side. Performance testing is primarily concerned by the speed of availability of the application for the end-user. In the case of a website, software quality assurance teams will use tools like WebPageTest to detect issues related to the size of images or the time needed to reach for external resources like Google Analytics scripts. Results might vary depending on the usage of browser caches or the distance between the user and the application resources. Load testing is used to assess the behavior of the system when it is used simultaneously by many users. Software testers use online testing platforms that can reproduce the access of the applications by a certain number of virtual users with different mobile devices or browsers. Issues detected will range from the physical specifications of the servers like the disk or virtual memory size to the software concurrency problems that can occurs in writing log file or table access in a database. Software Testing Magazine has created a list of free online load testing tools available to perform this activity. Spike [...]

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Free Load Testing Tools & Services

Software Testing Magazine — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 10:00:28 +0000

The software development trend that shifts the target platform from the desktop to web, cloud and mobile applications has fostered the development of load testing services and performance testing tools on the web. It is an obvious option to use web-based and cloud-based load testing tools for applications that can be accessed by web users. This article presents the free offers from commercial web load testing services providers. We have considered in this article only the tools that provide a load testing service that we define as the ability to simulate the access by multiple users on a defined time period. We will not mention tools that provide just a one-time assessment of your application performance, giving information such as the time needed to reach the server or to load the JavaScript library. We also list only the providers of free long term load testing services and not the vendors that offer only a limited time one time trial account. If you know a tool that is currently missing from this list, please use the contact form to let us know about it and we will update this article. Each free service comes with its limits. In the case of web load testing, they focus on the following criteria: the number of virtual users, the duration of the tests, the number of tests and the ability to test from multiple geographical locations. Some vendors put explicit values on each of these items, but other work with a credit system that [...]

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Commercial and Open Source JMeter Plugins

Software Testing Magazine — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 12:00:10 +0000

The Apache JMeter is an open source load testing tool developed by the Apache Foundation that can be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources. It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server and also some functional testing. JMeter has an open architecture that can be extended with plugins. The goal of the JMeter plugins is to extend the basic functionality of Apache Jmeter with graphs, load delivery controllers and other function that are not present in the core features of this tool. They also allow including or driving load testing from other tools, in a continuous integration or delivery process with Jenkins for instance. This article presents a list of open source and commercial JMeter plugins. We have also added some utilities and software testing frameworks build around Apache JMeter. If you want to add a tool to this page, just let us now using the contact form. Updates * October 8 2024 : added Prometheus Listener for JMeter, Jmeter Backend Azure, Pacing Jmeter Plugin * June 19 2023 : added KLoadGen, JMeter ElasticSearch Backend Listener, Influx DB v2.0 listener plugin for Apache JMeter * June 21 2021 : added Load Testing Center, JMeter GRPC Request, Kubernetes JMeter * March 17 2020 : added JMeter EC2 Script, Apache JMeter Plugin For Apache Dubbo, JMeter RMI plugin, JMeter WebSocket Samplers, Katalon JMeter Integration, AutoMeter * September 3 2018: added WS-Security Plugin for JMeter, MQTT JMeter Plugin, JMeter HTTP Form Manager * February 27 [...]

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Open Source Database Testing Tools

Software Testing Magazine — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:00:55 +0000

Database testing is one of the areas that might have the smaller number of open source tools. The programming languages have many xUnit tools and mocking frameworks, but this is not the case for databases. This article provides a list of open source tools that can be used to perform unit, load and security testing on several relational (MySQL, Oracle, SQLServer, etc.) and NoSQL databases. This situation might be the results of the fact that most of the main relational databases are commercial tools that come with an infrastructure already provided by the vendors. The current rise of the NoSQL databases and the many forks that have been created from the original MySQL open source relational database might however change this situation in the future. The tools covered in this article are Database Benchmark, Database Rider, DBChaos, DBKover, dbstress, DbUnit, DB Test Driven, GODBT, HammerDB, JdbcSlim, JdbcRunner, JDBDT (Java DataBase Delta Testing), Mindleaf, MyTAP, NBi, NoSQLMap, NoSQLUnit, pgTAP, pstress, ruby-plsql-spec, SeLite, simple-db-tester, Spring DBUnit, SQLancer, sqlmap, tSQLt, Tsung, TypeORM Seeding, utPLSQL. Updates September 26 2024; added DBChaos, SQLancer, TypeORM Seeding February 14 2023: added DBKover, GODBT, pstress, simple-db-tester May 5 2020: added JdbcRunner, Mindleaf, MyTAP, pgTAP, Spring DBUnit January 23 2017: added JDBDT (Java DataBase Delta Testing), Database Rider, dbstress, NBi July 18 2016: added JdbcSlim, ruby-plsql-spec, Tsung, utPLSQL December 1 2016: added SeLite Database Benchmark Database Benchmark is an open source .NET tool designed to stress test databases with large data flows. The application performs two main test scenarios: [...]

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Automated Load Testing Course with Gatling

Software Testing Magazine — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 14:26:32 +0000

QA had thoroughly tested the new release, performed Unit tests, functional tests and yet… we still crashed. The ultimate goal in development is to make sure the application works for the end users in the production env, not just in QA. This is where load testing and Gatling come in. This session will give you some basics about load testing, how to avoid common pitfalls and how to build efficient load tests with Gatling and Java. It discusses network protocols, application behavior and statistics. Gatling is an open source load- and performance-testing framework based on Scala, Akka and Netty. The first stable release was published on January 13, 2012. This automated software testing tool is designed to be used as a load testing tool for analyzing and measuring the performance of a variety of services, with a focus on web applications, APIs, and microservices. Video producer: https://www.devoxx.com/ Additional resource to learn Gatling: https://www.softwaretestingmagazine.com/tools/learning-gatling/

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Ensure Optimal Application Performance with Load Testing

Software Testing Magazine — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 15:59:35 +0000

Ensuring your applications perform optimally under various conditions is crucial in today’s digital landscape. Load testing is a critical aspect of performance testing because it helps organizations identify and mitigate performance bottlenecks ensuring a seamless experience for your users. In this whitepaper, we’ll explore the fundamentals of load testing focusing on the capabilities and benefits of using a powerful load testing tool like LoadView to help foster your load testing initiatives. Author: Kevin Pham What is Load Testing? Load testing is a subset of performance testing used to simulate real-world load on your software applications to determine the behavior if your application is under expected user loads. The main goal is to identify performance issues before your application reaches production. Understanding load testing and its importance is the key to implementing it into your existing workflows so that you can ensure your applications are performing optimally. Load testing is important because it ensures that your application can handle any expected traffic without performance degradation. It also identifies potential points of failure under various conditions. Load testing is also important for scalability as it helps organizations plan for their infrastructure needs based on user load predictions. Finally, load testing prevents any costly downtime and performance issues post-deployment which creates a better user experience and creates cost efficiency. Types of Load Testing Load Testing vs. Stress Testing vs. Performance Testing Load Testing: A type of testing that focuses on testing your application under expected load conditions. Stress Testing: The type of testing [...]

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Learning Gatling: Documentation, Tutorials, Videos

Software Testing Magazine — Fri, 24 May 2024 14:36:43 +0000

Gatling is an open source load testing tool. It officially supports HTTP, WebSocket, Server-Sent-Events and JMS. Gatling is developed in Scala and built upon Netty for non-blocking HTTP. It works with Akka for virtual users’ orchestration. This article provides pointers to documentation, tutorials, courses and videos to learn how to use Gatling. Author: Franco Martinig, Martinig & Associates Gatling is a highly capable open source load testing tool. It is designed for ease of use, maintainability and high performance. This tool provides excellent support for the HTTP protocol that makes it a preferred choice for load testing any HTTP server. As Gatling core engine is protocol agnostic, it is perfectly possible to implement support for other protocols. For example, Gatling currently also ships JMS support. Having scenarios that are defined in code and are resource efficient are the two requirements that motivated the creation of Gatling. The scenarios are self-explanatory, as they are based on an expressive DSL. The load testing scripts are easy to maintain and can be kept in a version control system. Gatling’s architecture is asynchronous as long as the underlying protocol, such as HTTP, can be implemented in a non-blocking way. This kind of architecture allows for implementing virtual users as messages instead of dedicated threads, saving resources. Thus, running thousands of concurrent virtual users is not an issue. Load testing tools are very helpful to assess the capabilities of websites to achieve a small response time when they receive a high volume of visits. This [...]

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Learning Locust: Documentation, Tutorials, Videos

Software Testing Magazine — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 10:34:51 +0000

Locust is an open source load testing tool that supports running load tests distributed over multiple machines and can be used to simulate millions of simultaneous users. This article provides pointers to documentation, tutorials, courses and videos to learn how to use Locust open source load testing tool. Author: Franco Martinig, Martinig & Associates Locust is an open source performance and load testing tool for HTTP and other protocols. The tests can be run from the command line or using its web-based UI. Locust’s approach allows defining the tests in regular Python code. Throughput, response times and errors can be viewed in real time and/or exported for later analysis. Software testers can import regular Python libraries. Locust’s pluggable architecture is expandable. It is very helpful to verify the capabilities of websites to achieve a small response time when they are under the stress of higher traffic, be it a spike of traffic to a trending MadSlots Casino Review, or a case of a ticketing system for a large music festival like Coachella. Locust Learning Resources * Your first test — Locust 2.20.1 documentation This is the official documentation from Locust on how to get started. The documentation also contains information on Locust configuration and running it in the cloud. Website: https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/quickstart.html * UCLA Locust tutorials This quick tutorial explains how to code and run a simple performance test with Locust from a container. Website: http://oak.cs.ucla.edu/refs/locust/index.html * AI Deploy – Tutorial – How to load test your application with Locust The aim of this tutorial [...]

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