One of my gripes about some commercial load testing tools is that they only provide a think time distribution (Z) that is equivalent to uniform variates in the client-script. If you want some other distribution, you have to code it and debug it yoursel...

One of the recurring questions in the GCaP class last week was: How can we make web-application load tests more representative of real Internet traffic? The sticking point is that conventional load-test simulators like LoadRunner, JMeter, and httperf, ...

One the nice things about PDQ-R (coming in release 5.0) is the ability to plot PDQ output directly in R. Here's a PDQ-R script, together with the corresponding graphical output, that I knocked up to show the effect on the throughput curve of adding mor...

When it comes to assessing application scalability, controlled measurements of the type that can be obtained with tools like Grinder or LoadRunner, are very useful because they provide a direct measurement of the throughput, X(N), as a function of the...