Does anyone have any experience in load testing ajax applications? specifically running jQuery as their javascript library?
Loadrunner and Neoload is the two of the load testing applications that works on the gui layer. But none of whom supports the jquery library.
As for the other load testing tools, like jmeter, grinder and other http layer tools. they just don’t cut it as you need to maintain application logic in your tests.
Selenium however uses real browsers which combined with selenium grid could be an option (also look http://www.browsermob.com), but then again installing a testing environment locally requires a lot of hardware.
Last time I looked, both LoadRunner and NeoLoad work at the HTTP layer, not the GUI layer. Just because a tool works at the HTTP layer does not mean that you need to replicate application logic in the tests. Smarter tools, like Load Tester (from webperformance.com), can configure many testcases automagically with little user intervention. We use it frequently with AJAX sites, though I’ve not looked specifically at JQuery use cases.