Alex Podelko wrote about the state of load testing in 2014. He recently did a load testing comparison to see what changed since then. And he realizes that the winds of change have changed it a lot. It’s titled “Are Times still Good for Load Testing?” and is an excellent read.
Alex currently serves as a board director for the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), a worldwide organization of performance and capacity management professionals. Read his full bio.
It’s crazy (but not unexpected) to read that so many people have left the big load testing companies after being acquired: Loadrunner (now @MicroFocus), Soasta (now @Akamai) and @BlazeMeter (now @Broadcom). Alex states:
The theory about acquisitions is that the bigger company will invest more and will provide more opportunities for the smaller acquired company. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that any of above mentioned acquisitions worked quite that way.
Alex goes on to talk about the companies that you would expect to be using load testing tools and that many see “less need for simple load testing due to increased scale and sophistication of systems”. Yet sites like PerfBytes keep reminding us about more sites that just crashed.
He analyzed various data from 2014 vs. today and concludes that Apache JMeter is now the most popular load testing tool and many SaaS tools are built to support it, like RedLine13 and others.
Now it’s your turn. Run your own load test on RedLine13 and do your own load testing comparison.