Organizations / Publications / Events

The Workshop on Performance and Reliability (WOPR)

Computer Measurement Group (CMG)

STP (Software Test Professionals) organizes Software Test Professionals (former Software Test & Performance) Conference (also published Software Test & Quality Assurance (before Software Test & Performance) Magazine, now discontinued)

TechWell (former SQE) publishes Better Software Magazine and organizes STAR (Software Testing Analysis & Review) and Better Software conferences, runs StickyMinds.com testing portal

Association for Software Testing (AST)

Díaz & Hilterscheid, organizes multiple conferences (and published Testing Experience Magazine, now discontinued)

Testing Circus Magazine

Professional Tester Magazine

Tea-time with Testers Magazine

ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering

TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation & Benchmarking (TPCTC)

Software Testing Conferences


Load Testing

Wikipedia about Software Performance Testing

Load Testing Terminology by Scott Stirling

Introduction to Performance Testing; The Who, What, Where, When and Why by Scott Barber

Microsoft's Patterns & Practices Performance Testing Guidance project

Testing for performance Part 1: Assess the problem space Part 2: Build out the test assets Part 3: Provide information by Michael Kelly

Load Testing: Points to Ponder by Alexander Podelko

Scott Barber's site, don't miss Publications and Presentations

Performance Testing Professional

Scott Moore / Northway Solution blog and resources

Mark Tomlinson's blog and writing

QA Forums, include "Performance & Load Testing" and many load testing tools forums

Wilson Mar's performance testing notes

MyLoadTest by Stuart Moncrieff, a lot of good LoadRunner info

Jason Harris' "Captain LoadTest" Blog

Corey Goldberg's Blog

Performance Engineering News, Avinash Mangipudi's blog

Shanti Subramanyam's blog about performance and scalability testing, workloads and tools

A Test Developer's blog by Shantonu Sarker

Performance Testing Study Material from QAInsights.com

Testing Performance articles

The Top 13 Mistakes in Load Testing Applications by Mark D. Anderson

Performance Testing Case Study, Part 1: Developing the Test Strategy by Ross Collard

Getting Things Done: Practical Web/e-Commerce Application Stress Testing by Robert Sabourin

Load Testing, Benchmarking, and Application Performance Management for the Web by Daniel A. Menascé

Load Testing of Web Sites by Daniel A. Menascé

High Performance Testing by Scott Barber

Tester PI: Performance Investigator by Scott Barber

Critical Success Factors for Load Test Projects by Mark McWhinney

Tuning Your Stress Test Harness by Kirk Pepperdine

Tales from the Lab: Best Practices in Application Performance Testing by Ellen Friedman

Real-World Load Testing Tips to Avoid Bottlenecks When Your Web App Goes Live by Jeff Dunmall and Keith Clarke

Performance testing Java servlet-based Web applications: A guide for software test engineers by Len DiMaggio

Analyzing Performance-Testing Results to Correlate Performance Plateaus and Stress Areas by Michael Kelly.

See about Performance Requirements are in the Performance Design section

Also check load testing tool vendor's sites for white papers (usually registration required)


Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks Exposed by Dan Downing

How to Identify the Usual Performance Suspects by Scott Barber

Diagnosing Symptoms of Poor System Performance by Scott Barber

Rapid Bottleneck Identification, Oracle white paper


Load Testing Tools

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Test Automation, 2019

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Automated Software Quality 2017-2018 Vendor Assessment - Driving Business Optimization via DevOps with Continuous Test and Integration

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Testing and ASQ SaaS 2017-2018 Vendor Assessment - Enabling Quality in and on the Cloud

Load Testing Tools by Wilson Mar

Software Tetsing Tool Finder by Cordell Vail

QA Testing Tools

It looks like only two "universal" (supporting multiple protocols, including legacy) load testing tools remain, both belong to Microfocus: LoadRunner and SilkPerformer.

Microfocus LoadRunner and A href="https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/performance-center/overview" target="_blank">Performance Center (was HP, Mercury)

Microfocus (former Borland, Segue) SilkPerformer. SilkPerformer resources.

No traces of MicroFocus (former Compuware) QALoad can be found on the MicroFocus site anymore

IBM Rational Performance Tester

Oracle Application Testing Suite (formerly e-Test Suite from Empirix), several good white papers (Empirix still provides solutions for VoIP and Contact Centers - Hammer). Microsoft Visual Studio Load Testing Services
NeoLoad from Neotys
NeoLoad Free Edition, full-functional up to 50 users
Neotys blog

Akamai (former SOASTA) CloudTest

Eggplant Performance (former Facilita), "user-centric performance testing"

LoadStorm, "the easy and cost effective way to load test web and mobile applications"

SandStorm from Impetus

SmartBear LoadComplete

AutomAI (former NRG Global) AppLoader, "any application from the end user's perspective" (looks at bitmaps on the screen)

RadView WebLOAD

WAPT is a load and stress testing tool for web interface, inexpensive, free trial

eValid, "test complex web applications from inside the browser to work from the same perspective as your users"

Appvance IQ (former PerformanceCloud, PushToTest), allows to re-use Selenium, Sahi, soapUI test scripts and unit tests written in Java, Ruby, Python, and PHP for performance testing

There are many specialised load testing tools, many for Web or database testing. See, for example,
SoftwareQATest.com by Rick Hower

Here is the list of open source load testing tools:
http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php

A couple of open source tools that looks more mature:

Apache JMeter (@ApacheJMeter)
JMeter Wiki, a collections of JMeter links
JMeter Links, a collections of links from stackoverflow
JMeter Plugins at Google Code
LoadRunner to JMeter – A successful transition by Swaraj Gupta
UBIK Load Pack, Productivity extensions for JMeter, and blog
BlazeMeter by CA, Cloud testing with JMeter and other tools, a great JMeter blog
OctoPerf, Cloud testing with JMeter and other tools, a good JMeter blog
RedLine13, Cloud testing with JMeter and other tools, a good JMeter blog
Flood by Tricentis, Cloud testing with JMeter and other tools

Gatling stress tool (@GatlingTool)

Locust, an open source load testing tool using Python (@locustio)

k6, "Like unit testing, for performance" (@k6_io)

Tsung, an open-source multi-protocol distributed load testing tool, developed in Erlang

Taurus, automation-friendly framework for Continuous Testing

OpenSTA Originally developed by Cyrano as a commercial tool. OpenSTA stands for Open Systems Testing Architecture. Other branches of the Cyrano code are commercial tools QTest from Quotium and AgileLoad.

JUnitPerf, a collection of JUnit test decorators used to measure the performance and scalability of functionality contained within existing JUnit tests

p-unit, an open source framework for unit test and performance benchmark

JUnitBench, JUnit extensions for benchmark and performance testing

Databene ContiPerf, a lightweight testing utility that enables the user to easily leverage JUnit 4 test cases as performance tests

Japex micro-benchmark framework

Hardware appliances can be useful if it is necessary to test network devices or simulate a big number of users with limited scripting requirements. For example, Spirent Avalanche or Ixia products.
Load DynamiX allows to test network storage devices (former SwiftTest).
Ixia's BreakingPoint, security and performance testing platform.

Comparisons

An Overview of Load Test Tools by Julien Buret and Nicolas Droze (2003), includes OpenSTA, DieselTest, TestMaker, Grinder, LoadSim, JMeter, LoadTest, Rubis

Load Test Tools Evaluation by Abraham Jacob et al. (2002)

Stress, Load, Volume, Performance, Benchmark and Base Line Testing Tool Evaluation and Comparison by Cordell Vail (2005)

Load Testing and Performance Monitoring as Services

Compuware APM Web Load Testing (former Gomez), many good white papers

Keynote testing, monitoring and measurement products and services

Neustar Webmetrics monitoring services, managed load testing, and web performance management

NCC Group (former Site Confidence) web performance monitoring and load testing services

Catchpoint Real-Time Web Performance Monitoring

Yottaa Web Performance Monitoring / Optimization

BlazeMeter, a 100% JMeter-compatible, self-service load testing cloud

flood.io, load testing service, supports JMeter and Gatling

Load Impact, load testing and reporting as an online service

Related Tools

Shunra Software products allow real network simulation during load testing. Integrated with LoadRunner.

CA LISA Service Virtualization (former ITKO)

iTrinegy (former Itheon) WAN / Network emulation

The TesLA (Test Lab Automation) Alliance is an open industry alliance of IP test vendors

Network Test Automation Forum (NTAF), created to develop and promote interoperability standards in the test community


Benchmarking

Wikipedia about Benchmarking

Transaction Processing Performance Council TPC Benchmarks

Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC)

The Business Applications Performance Council (BAPCo)

Oracle and Sun Benchmarks

SAP Standard Application Benchmarks

Intel Performance processor benchmark results

AMD Performance Benchmarks for Modern Business

Cloud Benchmarks from CloudHarmony (now Gartner)

Cloud Benchmark Reports from Cloud Spectator

Technology benchmark standards for financial organizations from STAC Benchmark Council

Microsoft Azure Compute Benchmark Scores

Wilson Mar about Multi-Tier Reference Apps for Benchmarking

50 TB Data Warehouse Benchmark on IBM System z IBM Redbook

AC&NC collection of I/O benchmark programs for UNIX and Windows

Iperf network benchmarking tool

VMware VMmark virtualization benchmark

The Performance Database Server (PDS) different benchmark results, somewhat outdated

Server and Storage I/O Benchmarking and Performance Resources

Benchmarking Directory

Compiler Connection's benchmark resource page

Web Framework Benchmarks

The Gartner Relative Performance Estimate (RPE2, originally from Ideas International), RPE2 white paper

Cloud Database Benchmarking-as-a-Service


Generic Testing

Some links to general testing sites (in addition to mentioned above).

Testing Distributed Systems, a curated list by Andrey Satarin (@asatarin)

SearchSoftwareQuality.com from TechTarget

Testing Circus Magazine

Professional Testing Magazine

Software Testing Hub / Software Test Magazine

Testing Resources from LogiGear

Cem Kaner's site

James Bach's site

Douglas Hoffman's site

Bret Pettichord's site

Karen Johnson's site

Brian Marick's site

Michael Bolton's site

Elisabeth Hendrickson's site

Jonathan Kohl's site

Jon Bach's blog

Lisa Crispin's site

Anne-Marie Charrett's site

Fiona Charles' site

RBCS / Rex Black site

Test Automation Guru by Vinoth Selvaraj

SoftwareQATest.com Software QA and Testing Resource Center by Rick Hower

Grig Gheorghiu's blog

Ministry of Testing
including Exploratory Testing resources

Testing Education Lab, Black Box Testing and other courses

Test Driven Development community

Applied Testing and Technology (ApTest) a big list of links

comp.software.testing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Test and Measurement (electronics)


Books

Start from eBook Web Load Testing For Dummies and Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

Click on the book or its title below to see book information and reviews (if available) on Amazon.com

Performance Testing Microsoft .NET Web Applications, Microsoft, 2002.
J2EE Performance Testing by Peter Zadrozny, et al, 2003.
Integrated Approach to Web Performance Testing: A Practitioner's Guide by B. M. Subraya, 2006.
Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, Microsoft, 2007. Also available online.
The Art of Application Performance Testing: From Strategy to Tools by Ian Molyneaux, 2nd edition, 2014.
eBook Web Load Testing For Dummies by Scott Barber, 2011.
Performance Testing With JMeter 2.9 by Bayo Erinle, 2013.
JMeter Cookbook by Bayo Erinle, 2014.
Master Apache JMeter From load testing to DevOps by Antonio Gomes Rodrigues, Philippe Mouawad, and Milamber, 2018.

CMG