Load testing

[Eric Waite]

I am writing a loadtester for our application, and I am testing against IIS/Tomcat versus Apache webserver/Tomcat.
I am threading connections to the webserver by opening a socket and writing to the outputstream.

Socket server = .....
OutputStream toServer = server.getOutputStream();
toServer.write(request);

My question is probably more on the webserver side, is this an appropriate way to handle sending requests to a webserver? If I create a multi-threaded application and send 500 different requests using sockets, is this the same as 500 client browser requests, as far as the webserver is concerned?

- Eric

[William Brogden]

Much better to use a toolkit that really simulates a browser. I like HttpClient from the Apache commons project. With a little work you can simulate more complex interactions. Since Httpclient handles cookies you can use session logic.

Bill

[Eric Waite]

I had issues with most of the tools and handling applets that send serialized objects back and forth to the server.