Re: [OpenSTA-devel] Open Source Load Testing

[Bernie V. <Ber...@iP...>]

Hi Dan,

For grins, I downloaded WebLOAD and began learning it using a customer's 
site I am currently testing with OpenSTA. I found the quick start tutorial 
very good and had a load test running within a few hours. What I also found 
was that the CPU consumption is very high compared to OpenSTA. I may do a 
bake off next week to compare the performance of the two in a more 
controlled way, but what I saw the other day was not encouraging. If I 
recall correctly I was running 10 or 20 users, about a 30 second think time, 
and my 3 GHz processor was averaging about 50% busy. That's huge compared to 
under the same conditions. I suspect their strategy is indeed to get people 
on "the right track using their product" and then after they have invested 
time and effort, then the revenue will start rolling as people upgrade to be 
able to run larger loads.

-Bernie


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Sutcliffe" <da...@Op...>
To: "OpenSTA Developer Discussions" <ope...@li...>
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: [OpenSTA-devel] Open Source Load Testing


>I had to smile when I read the first line of the press release:
>> RadView Launches World's First Commercial-Grade Open Source
>> Internet Performance Testing Product into $1 Billion Market
>
> First? ... really? :)
>
> Reading more we have:
>> Companies that require commercial support, additional productivity
>> features and compatibility with third-party protocols have the
>> option of purchasing WebLOAD Professional directly from RadView.
>
> So, their intentions are "exactly" the same as Cyrano's were back in
> 2000 ;)  Here's where you can find out what those "additional
> productivity features" are:
>  http://www.radview.com/product/Editions-Comparison.aspx
> The biggy is that you need to go to the commercial version if you
> want to do distributed load generation.
>
> When we took a tool that was about to be released commercially and
> decided to open source it, the big issue was the commercial
> libraries that were used and had to be ripped out - this effectively
> meant taking a number of steps backwards and destabilizing a fairly
> stable product base.  I wonder if RadView had similar hurdles?
>
> Corey Goldberg wrote:
>> There doesn't seem to be a huge number of developers interested in
>> perf/load tools as has been seen in other Open Source tool
>> communities (OpenSTA, JMeter, Grinder, etc).
>
> This is my #1 theory of what is stopping OpenSTA becoming more
> successful, getting better, and progressing as a project.  There
> simply aren't developers out there who have to regularly do
> performance testing (and therefore are driven to get involved).
> The people regularly doing performance testing either don't have
> the time to get involved in development or don't have a skillset
> that allows them to do it.  WebLoad will have the advantage here in
> the fact that RadView will be sponsoring developers (presumably
> their developers) to work on the open source tool - just like
> Cyrano did with OpenSTA until it all fell to pieces ...
>
>> possibly since this is starting from such a mature code base it
>> could be different.. but who knows.
>
> Much of OpenSTAs code was very very mature commercial code before
> it was "released" as OpenSTA - some would say this was less than
> helpful ;)
>
> The cynic in me suspects that RadView are doing this because they
> realise they are losing too many sales due to the availibility of
> tools like OpenSTA.  Better to at least get there potential customers
> on the right track ...
>
> As to whether this can help or hinder the future of OpenSTA ...
> I personally can't see it helping, it will dilute an already
> weak potential developer pool - maybe some code and ideas could be
> shared but I don't think we're lacking any code, ideas, or available
> libraries (open source ones) as it stands, just the developer time
> (or funding) to improve OpenSTA is what is really lacking. :shrug:
>
> I'll be following WebLoad to see what happens.
> Cheers
> /dan
> -- 
> Daniel Sutcliffe <Da...@Op...>
>  OpenSTA part-time caretaker - http://OpenSTA.org/
>
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