Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool

When building an application, performance is an important consideration because the application must support a target number of users. Performance tuning for Web applications is more difficult than for traditional client/server applications because you can’t predict the number of users that your Web site will have to support (unless you use a login or filtering action to lock down your site). To facilitate Web-application-performance testing, Microsoft introduced a new tool called the Web Application Stress tool (formerly code-named Homer).

Microsoft designed the Web Application Stress tool to provide a reasonable simulation of activity against a Web application or static Web server. This tool lets you test any site that you can view with a browser. The tool’s GUI is easy to set up and use and lets you run tests from one workstation or as many workstations as you need to simulate the number of potential users of your Web site. You can also control the load each client places on the application. After you complete a test, the tool provides a report that details the test’s results, including loading page times and data from Performance Monitor counters that you selected to record. . . .