Features and Descriptions

Support for GET and POST methods.

Both GET and POST methods are fully supported. Passing HTTP parameters using either of these methods is also very easy.

SSL support

Secure sockets layer is supported for testing of secure web sites. Additionally, a test plan may mix requests to secure and non-secure web pages.

Support for cookies

SiteTester supports both receiving and sending of cookies. Cookies for different virtual clients are kept separate so that each virtual client appears to be a separate web browser to the web site.

Support for dynamic HTTP requests

SiteTester supports dynamically creating and issuing HTTP requests at run-time. A request may be constructed based on passed in parameters, or information returned by the web server from a previous HTTP request.

Randomized or fixed delays

To better simulate real-world web clients, randomized or fixed delays can be inserted between HTTP requests.

Multithreaded virtual clients

The use of multithreaded virtual clients allows a single test engine process to simulate a large number of web clients, issuing requests to the web server in parallel.

Parallel test engines^*

The parallel test engines feature allows multiple test engines on multiple computers to execute in parallel, coordinated by a central test manager process.

Detailed result logs

Various levels of result logging are supported. At the lowest level, only a positive or negative result is logged for each HTTP request. At the highest level, detailed timing statistics and the full HTML web server responses are logged for each HTTP request.

Detailed timing statistics

SiteTester can be configured to measure the round-trip latency for the web server to respond to HTTP requests. SiteTester can be configured to measure only some types of requests or all requests. The detailed timing measurements can be output to a text file for importing and analysis by a spreadsheet program. A report can also be generated showing the minimum, maximum, and average response times over intervals of time (e.g. The average response time for each 5 minute interval over a one hour period).

Load test plans in XML

A load test plan defines different levels of load to be generated at specific times. For instance, a test plan may consist of starting with a load of one virtual client and gradually increasing the load to 100 simultaneous virtual clients. This allows data to be collected on the performance and response time of a web site for a full spectrum of web load. Load test plans are written in XML.

Java based

SiteTester is 100% Java and will execute on any platform supporting Java 2.

Extremely flexible

SiteTester supports an extremely flexible XML-based scripting language for test plan specification. Anything not directly supported by the SiteTest scripting language may be supported by subclassing the SiteTest java classes.

Flexible return HTML processing

SiteTester directly supports processing the HTML returned by the web server via regular expressions or using an HTML parser. The SiteTester classes may also be subclassed for full flexibility in processing the return HTML.

Regular expressions

SiteTester supports Perl 5 regular expressions for processing of HTML returned by the web server.