The very fresh and raw 0.1 version of http://loadtest.io is now available for your enjoyment.

What is It?

LoadTest.io is multi-threaded load-tester with auto-discovery. It is ideal for load-tests that target breadth. You give loadtest.io some initial URLs and it will crawl the rest of your website, auto-discovering links as it goes. It will also try to not repeat already-tested URLs and reach maximum number of unique URLs in the shortest time possible.

Due to this characteristic, LoadTest.io is a very good tool for testing websites that employ caching. Such websites can not adequately be tested by stress-testing tools that only hit limited number of URLs.

Why Would You Care?

The majority of tools currently available do not have auto-discovery feature. Which means they can only test a fixed set of URLs. But any reasonably built web-system has some kind of caching, so after the first hit, any consequent hit to the same URL only tests your cache not - the web system (application layer, database etc). Such test can be unrealistically optimistic and misleading. Real traffic from real users will not just hit 20 hand-picked URLs from your web-site.