Question

I have a website that uses AJAX heavily to communicate with the server. Now I want to do performance and stress testing using automatic scripts. Do you have any recommendations?

The functionality maybe, given a URL, hook up the page ready callback. In the callback I can emulate “click” to some button using the button’s id property.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There are a bunch of tools you can use to automate the UX of your site to make sure that things work fine. I’ll break them down arbitrarily.

The ones that come to mind are Sahi and Selenium. These allow you to automate clicking, submitting etc. similar to what GUI testing tools do and test your application.

Mechanize (Perl version(the original), Ruby version and python version) are used to write scripts that can interact with your website to simulate a user. They’re not “GUI” based so don’t rely on a browser. This might affect what you can do with Javascript. Another similar tool (although I don’t have personal experience with it) is watir.

If you want to hammer your website (i.e. performance testing), they only thing I’ve come across is the Apache Benchmarker. It can generate reports on how much raw traffic your site can take before it comes crashing down. Assuming your callbacks are not stateful, you can use this to hammer them.