Loadrunner is pretty expensive. What are some alternatives you have found which are more cost effective, and for what environments and types of load test ?
Thankyou.
Loadrunner is pretty expensive. What are some alternatives you have found which are more cost effective, and for what environments and types of load test ?
Thankyou.
Let's try a different tack, what is the financial risk to your organization if the product you are deploying fails to scale? What is the cost per minute of downtime or slow response time related to the apps? How does this affect the core business? If self-service clients cannot answer their questions from the website will call agents be overloaded?
Performance testing is all about the measurement of business risk. Sure there are somne defects found and fixed along the way, but by the time you get here you already know the application works for one person. For if it does not work for one, it shall never work for many.
Measured against the risk of many applications, the cost of LoadRunner, even on a project basis, tends to be very manageable. There is an exception to this, this is for organizations which give the short shrift to QA in general. For those environments, no cost is too low to pay. This is usually reflected in a poor quality deliverable.
If you have an application which only LoadRunner supports the interface for, then there are no substitutes. If you need a deep diagnostic capability that is uniquely supported by HP and not by others, then once again there are no substitutes. These same arguments would hold true for all tools. There are certainly other commercial tools in the marketplace, such as Borland's SilkPerformer or Compuware's QALoad, but you are going to pay about the same in total project costs for these tools. Where you may save a bit on tools you will spend more for personnel for the relative sparseness of the skills in the marketplace. If you think finding a good LoadRunner person is difficult, try looking for SilkPerformer or QALoad qualified individuals, they exist but they are even rarer owing to the installed base of the tools.
Your question seems very much geared towards the expense rather than the measurement against risk side of the house. HP does offer short term leases that are 1 and 3 months in length for controllers and users that may make the purchase more palletable and directly expensible to a given project. Would you want to try the open source route? Perhaps. But be warned, performance projects are like balloons, no matter which tool you pick if you have a robust performance testing practice the overall cost is going to be about the same. So, if you pick a free tool, you are going to squeeze the end of the balloon which represents your core load tool selection and you are going to push costs into the script development arena and the analysis arena where the open source tools are quite inefficient as compared to the commercial variants.....and this would apply to all of the commercial variants versus the open source tools.
I don't know if you are old enough to remember this ad campaign but I shall give it a shot "Porsche, there is no substitute." Like a sports car, LoadRunner is a highly engineered product with over a decade of direct engineering support and evolution. You may not need that level of engineering. Have you considered the advantages of a Kia Rio? But seriously, there are some lower priced tools in the market. The testing tool market is stratefied into the dominant commercial tools, some smaller less expensive niche players and then the freebies. There are engineering, efficiency and analytical advantages that come with moving up the price chain, which is simply a reflection of dedicated R&D budgets.
check out:
OpenSTA
I have used OpenSTA, plus some homegrown stuff.
In the past, I've also used e-Load (currently from Oracle).
Do you have programming experience?
building home-brewed tools is another option.
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