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Contents 
Introduction
Mercury Load Runner
IBM Rational Tester
Segue SilkPerformer
NeoLoad
Specifications
How we tested
Editor's choice
About RMIT |
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Okay, we've covered probably 70 percent of the market with the previous three. Unfortunately Compuware and Radview declined to take part in this evaluation; we would have had the top five in the market otherwise.
We've read some good things about NeoLoad so decided to try it out. Our first impression was it's a little light and doesn't quite look like an enterprise tool -- the main reason we didn't include it in the main review.
Neoload, however, doesn't try and position itself up there with expensive high-end testing products, nor does it compare itself with the really cheap tools which are limited in features -- it sits somewhere in the middle. We think it should do well in this space.
The tool is perfectly marketed for businesses that don't have a large budget but want the confidence that their applications can scale well.
Leasing a 500-user licence for a week, which may be all the time you need to perform your testing, will only cost around AU$900. Pretty cheap but how good is it? It's a piece of cake to install and if you have never done any form of load testing before you will be surprised how quickly you can become expert using this software. It supports the most popular Internet technologies but does lack in diagnostics.
The reporting is excellent -- we were surprised at the professional PDF reports NeoLoad can generate. It can also export your reports to HTML.
The annoying thing was that we couldn't launch a load test for a predefined number of iterations. We had to end the test after a certain time but we were advised just before going to print that the new version v1.1, which only just recently came out, features an option to run your tests by iteration.
There are a few other new things you can read about here, but the most important feature added is the iterations.
It doesn't have any local support but we doubt you will have any major problems getting up to speed with this product. It does, however, offer international phone support as well as e-mail support which is probably all you will ever need.
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I think you missed iMacros in your review. We use it to test our websites. It's great! It has by far the best support for AJAX and Flash applets and the scripting interface is extremely powerful.