I am going to put four sets of criteria out there for you to examine tools, and there are lots of them available in the open source and commercial realms to performance test applications.

(1) Will it exercise my interfaces on my apoplication? There are lots of tools out there which are free but interface monolithic and may not exercise your app fully. Commercial tools have wider protocol/interface support than do open source ones (2) Will the reporting match my needs? Nothing is more frustrating than running a test and then having to spend days trying to pull together results into some meaningful form for analysis and to determine whether you have hit your requirements or not. Once again, this is an area where commercial tools beat the snot out of the open source ones. (3) Does my team have the technical skills to use the tool? You don't want to be climbing the hurdles or both performance testing process, analysis and then yeat another language/tool to learn at the same time. Bea realistic. (4) Will it run on my testing infrastrcture? Check the requirements. IF a particular OS and version is noted, then use it or don't use the tool. Fewer things are more frustrating to tool support when someone calls/emails in with a a problem only to find that the requirements for installation and operation have been ignored.

Numbers 1-3 are critical. Have a miss on any of these three and you may have well have purchased the most expensive commercial tool and hired the most expensive consulting firm to deploy it for you - You don't want to be caught driving nails with the butt end of a screwdriver simply because your boss told you that the nail gun was tool expensive for the house you were asked to build (Note: Nail guns are often avilable for rental, just like commercial test tools :) )

I am going to put four sets of criteria out there for you to examine tools, and there are lots of them available in the open source and commercial realms to performance test applications.

1. Will it exercise my interfaces on my application? There are lots of tools out there which are free but interface monolithic and may not exercise your app fully. Commercial tools have wider protocol/interface support than do open source ones
2. Will the reporting match my needs? Nothing is more frustrating than running a test and then having to spend days trying to pull together results into some meaningful form for analysis and to determine whether you have hit your requirements or not. Once again, this is an area where commercial tools beat the snot out of the open source ones.
3. Does my team have the technical skills to use the tool? You don't want to be climbing the hurdles or both performance testing process, analysis and then yet another language/tool to learn at the same time. Be realistic.
4. Will it run on my testing infrastructure? Check the requirements. IF a particular OS and version is noted, then use it or don't use the tool. Fewer things are more frustrating to tool support when someone calls/emails in with a a problem only to find that the requirements for installation and operation have been ignored.

Numbers 1-3 are critical. Have a miss on any of these three and you may have well have purchased the most expensive commercial tool and hired the most expensive consulting firm to deploy it for you - You don't want to be caught driving nails with the butt end of a screwdriver simply because your boss told you that the nail gun was tool expensive for the house you were asked to build (Note: Nail guns are often available for rental, just like commercial test tools)