Simple Windows Load Testing

Today a coworker asked me to recommend him a simple tool for load testing a specific URL. Now, there are plenty of tools out there, but most are written for Linux or overkill for a simple task of spamming one URL to test performance. In MSDN land the tool most mentioned seems to be WCAT which is a very powerful tool but its like using a nuke to open a Walnut, an example of one of the possible configurations is shown below.

As you can see, it can be used to control a bank of client machines from a single controller. And to use it you 'simply' specify a bunch of parameters (id, url, verb, redirverb, statuscode, redirect, cookies, secure, handshake, protocol, algorithms, version, postdata, close, authentication, username, password, server, port, handler to name a few) in a script file. Easy right?



To be honest I looked at the documentation and panicked slightly, surely there is a better way I thought and thankfully so did someone else, someone that had a bit more time on their hands than me, they come up with a Fiddler extension which makes it dead easy to use. (If you do any web development stuff or just want to check out what HTTP traffic is going to/from your computer you should check out Fiddler, its Wireshark for HTTP.)

Install everything required and then open Fiddler and query the site you want to connect, high light the sessions you want to use in the load test and select the run WCAT option. That'll use the default settings shown below, which for the most part will be pretty good. But these can be changed easily as shown on the blog post about the tool.



You can then view the results in your web browser, which gives simple stats like requests per second.

Hope you find the tool useful!