Website Performance Testing Tools

Question

I have a contract before me that says our client will use "the following metrics will be used to determine performance standards" of the MVC4 based web site we want to deploy for them. I am looking for a tool that can help me test for these specific metrics, preferably the same tool that MS uses. The cited metrics are:

"Performance = The time that elapses between the HTTP Request and complete post of the web page": "Microsoft standard is <6.00 seconds"

"Availability test = # of successful tests divided by Total # of tests taken": "Microsoft standard is 99.9%"

I know this is more legalese than proper technical requirements, but I'm hoping some web pros with more exposure to this side of things than me might recognise the requirements and suggest a tool or approach for meeting them.

Answer 1

Keep in mind that your website is designed to handle multiple users. The size of your client's user base will impact performance characteristics. Performance and Availability with 1 concurrent user will be not the same as with let say, 100 users. You should use a load testing tool which measures these characteristics under various load levels. We have a fremium tool StresStimulus which does this, but there are many others.

Answer 2

You can also try DareBoost.com which will give you performance and quality metrics and details information on what should be fix. You can launch an analysis for free to see how your website is performing now. And also track your website performance over time.

Or WebPageTest.org which is a bit more technical and only offer one shot analysis

Answer 3

Uptrends and Site24x7 are commercial tools that can monitor web site loading performance.

Many more can be found at Alternativeto.net.