Top Open-Source Tools to Consider for Web Service Performance Testing

The performance of your web application transforms your business more than you can imagine. Enterprises have started considering web service performance testing as a crucial part of their products development life cycle. 

Unfortunately, most companies do not routinely test the performance and scalability of their products, and most lack the tools to do so correctly. 

Though you can find several paid tool options out there, for the right organization, free and open-source tools may be a good alternative—or the perfect addition to your business toolset.

Following are the best open-source tools to consider for Web Service Performance Testing :

Locust.io – This is an excellent tool for understanding the performance on the server-side.

Bees with Machine Guns – The authors define it as a convenience for providing many bees to attack targets.

Multi-Mechanize – This is an open-source framework for performance and load testing that runs parallel Python scripts to generate load against a remote site or service. It’s generally used for web performance and scalability testing, but you can also use Multi-Mechanize to create a workload against any remote API available from Python.

Siege – This HTTP load-testing and benchmarking service were created to let web developers test code under duress, to understand how it will stand up to load on the Internet. Siege continues basic authentication, cookies, and HTTP and HTTPS orders, and lets the user hit a web server with a configurable number of simulated web browsers. 

Apache Bench – Use this tool for benchmarking your Apache HTTP server, to get an opinion of how Apache operates.

Httperf – This tool estimates web server performance and provides a compliant facility for creating varied HTTP workloads and measuring server execution. 

The focus is not on achieving a particular benchmark but on rendering a robust, high-performance tool that promotes the production of both micro- and macro-level benchmarks. 

The three distinctive characteristics of httperf are its robustness, which incorporates the capacity to generate and maintain server overload; support for the HTTP/1.1 and SSL protocols; and its extensibility to new workload generators and performance measures.

JMeter – Use Apache JMeter to test execution both on static and dynamic resources (files, servlets, Perl scripts, Java objects, databases and queries, FTP servers, and more). 

You can also utilise it to assume a heavy load on a server, network, or object to test its durability or examine overall performance under various load types. 

Ultimately, consider using it to make a graphical summary of performance or to test your server/script/object behaviour following a heavy collective load.

Google PageSpeed Insights – Google PageSpeed Insights, a setting that examines the content of a web page and produces recommendations to make your pages load faster. Reducing page load times lowers bounce rates and boosts conversion rates.

Google ngx_pagespeed  –  It speeds up your site and decreases page load time. This open-source nginx server module automatically affects web performance best methods to pages and associated assets (CSS, JavaScript, images) without expecting you to change your actual content or workflow.

Google mod_pagespeed – It speeds up your site and decreases page load time. This open-source Apache HTTP server module automatically connects web performance best methods to pages and associated assets (CSS, JavaScript, images) without asking that you modify your actual content or workflow.

WebPagetest.org – It provides deep insights into the appearance of the client-side in a kind of real browsers. This efficiency will test a web page in any browser, from any place, over any network condition—and it’s free.