Google senior test egnineer Goranka Bjedov has a good blog that I’ve been reading lately. The latest post is about performance testing which is sort of relevant to our project currently. The blog entry also points to a video presentation that are both worth a read or watch.
We are currently using one of the commercial tools mentioned in the video, which probably cost a lot, but it wasn’t our decision or budget. I can understand the arguments for using some of the open source tools, but I also see that I would miss a couple of features:
- The graphs. I know, it’s all really pretty stuff for managers. But when you’re new to performance testing, and don’t have the luxury of learning all the ins and outs of performance testing it is a great help to us to be able to get the graphs out easily.
- The probe-integration. Commercial tools usually have integration to let you do deeper analysis of the problem. This includes SQL-profiling and java-profiling to show you which areas are spending time. This might be a newbie feature again, but it does help in tracking down the problem areas.