product comparisons
Webserver Stress Tool from Paessler
This comparison looks at exactly how Web Performance Load Tester™ 2.7 compares with the Webserver Stress Tool 6.
| Feature | WPT | Webserver Stress Tool |
|---|---|---|
| Understands Web Pages | Records and reports statistics for web pages in the same way a user would view web pages. | No concept of a web page, only "clicks". The cheaper versions don't even download images. |
| Page Validation | Reports network, protocol, and application level errors. | Not supported |
| Session Tracking | The following session techniques are automatically detected and configured via
a wizard:
Cookies |
Cookies Only |
| Think Time | Uses recorded think time for each web page, or can turn off think times for stress testing | No way to record think times. No concept of a web page, only urls. Uses same value for each URL or or random values. |
| Multiple IP Addresses | Each virtual user can come from a different IP address. |
Not supported |
| How many users can your website handle? | Gives a performance rating in terms of simultaneous users calculated from your site's own performance goals. |
Not supported |
| Which web pages are slow? | Sorted web page duration report identifies which pages are slow and under what conditions. | Not supported |
| Usernames & Passwords | Authentication wizard automatically detects and configures usernames and passwords for form field, NTML (Windows Domain), client certificate, and basic authentication. | Supports form field and basic authentication, but they must be configured by hand by editing each URL. |
| Multiple Computers | Any number of computers can be hooked together and automaticallly controlled to generate large loads and then collate all statistics. Each test generating computer is monitored and load balanced to insure accuracy. Note that there is no extra charge for using multiple computers to generate more load. | Not supported |
| Server Statistics | Collects memory usage and system load from the target web server. | Not supported |
| Multiple Simultaneous Test Cases | Multiple test cases can be combined into a load profile based on percentages, where each case can be a different percentage of the total load and have other unique settings. For example, 20% of the users could be searching via modems, 20% searching via DSL, 20% making a purchase, etc. | The program must be run separately for each test case, so that the test results for each are separate. This means there's no way to look at the real performance statistics. |
| Custom Graphs | Besides the user capacity and web page duration analysis, WPT supports any number of of custom graphs. Individual reports can be exported as images or spreadsheet data | A report can be generated of the canned graphs into HTML or MS Word. |
| Load Balancing | The performance and memory usage of all test computers is monitored to insure accurate performance measurements. | Not supported |
| Supports Windows, Linux, Unix & Solaris? | Web Performance Load Tester™ supports those platforms, and is planning on adding OSX support for version 3.0. | Windows Only |