Product Comparisons
OpenSTA
This chart shows a list of the differences between Web Performance Load Tester™ 2.8 and OpenSTA to the best of our knowledge. The most striking difference between the two products is that OpenSTA requires knowledge of the SCL scripting language to do anything. In many situations the automatic configuration features of WPT will greatly reduce the time it takes to develop test scripts, more than justifying the cost.
| Feature | WPT | OpenSTA |
|---|---|---|
| How many users can your website handle? | Gives a performance rating in terms of simultaneous users calculated from your site's own performance goals. | Not supported. |
| Session Tracking | Almost all session tracking techniques are automatically detected and configured. | Session tracking must be detected and configured by hand by inserting controllers for each individual URL. Each URL request is described by several lines of code, making adding the sessions tedious and time consuming. Requires knowledge of the SCL scripting language. |
| .NET | Automatically detects use of .NET specific technologies such as the VIEWSTATE and configures the test cases. | Handling .NET with OpenSTA is so complicated they recommend use of their consulting service instead. |
| Application State Management | Many application frameworks can embed the state of web-based applications anywhere, in hidden form fields, URL parameters, javascript. WPT's Application State Management feature automatically analyzes test cases for these techniques and configures them accordingly. | In order to support this type of thing you would have to spend days analyzing the HTML headers and content to figure out how your application is working, and then add multiple lines of code for each URL. Many of our customers have hundreds of state variables on each page, making it almost impossible to code by hand. |
| Users simulated per computer | Most modern computers with 800MHz or better with 256M of RAM can simulate 500 virtual users for most test cases. | A simple web page test with images and think time locked up the computer at 100% of the CPU at about 300 virtual users. The results of the test were inaccurate. |
| SSL Support | Records and plays back SSL, including client certificates. | Has only partial SSL recording, where the connection back to the browser isn't secured. This partial technique doesn't appear to work on many sites. |
| Which web pages are slow? | Sorted web page duration report identifies which pages are slow and under what conditions. | Not supported. |
| Requires a scripting language? | Test cases are recorded and edited using a graphical user interface. | Requires learning the SCL scripting language inspired by Fortran. |
| Usernames & Passwords | Authentication wizard automatically detects and configures usernames and passwords for form field, NTML (Windows Domain), client certificate, and basic authentication. | Supports form field and basic authentication, but they must be configured by hand by editing each URL. |
| Bandwidth Simulation | Virtual users can connect to the web server using different simulated bandwidths. With a load profile 50% of the users could connect using a DSL bandwidth, and 50% with 56K modem bandwidths. | Not supported. |
| Load Balancing | The performance and memory usage of all test computers is monitored to insure accurate performance measurements. While controlling multiple computers the task of simulating users is load balanced among them using dynamic performance measurements of the test computers. | Not supported. |
| Multiple IP Addresses | Each virtual user can come from a different IP address. |
Not supported. |
| Server Statistics | Collects memory usage and system load from the target web server. | Supports the full range of NT performance counters or data made available via SNMP. |
| Multiple Sockets | Modern browsers open at least two simultaneous socket connections for each web page. WPT records and plays back using the same number of socket connections as the client. | Each virtual user opens a single socket connection. |
| NTLM | Automatically supported in both recording and playback. | Not supported. |
| Browser Configuration | Supports automatic configuration of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla & Firefox in most cases. | Requires hand configuration of the browser in most cases. |