Paessler Blog - All about IT, Monitoring, and PRTG

New Freeware Offering: Webserver Stress Tool

Written by Florian Staffort | Dec 15, 2014

If you're a long-time Paessler customer, you will have noticed that, over the last couple of years, we have streamlined our product portfolio and focused our energy more and more on our flagship product PRTG Network Monitor. During this development, for example, the functionalities of PRTG Router Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor have merged into PRTG Network Monitor. This not only helps us as a company to make the most of our resources, it also strongly benefits our customers as they get all the capabilities they need to monitor the individual components of their specific IT infrastructure, virtual or physical, in just one product—without having to purchase any add-ons. Simply put, PRTG is the complete package.

 

Test the Performance of Your Webservers for Free

Besides PRTG, there was one last tool we kept selling until today: the Webserver Stress Tool. This HTTP client/server test application is designed to pinpoint critical performance issues in your website or webserver that may prevent optimal experience for your site's visitors. Pretty useful, don't you think? Although a substantial amount of Webserver Stress Tool licenses were sold on a monthly basis, we decided that it was time to concentrate our development and support power completely on our main product, which—as you can see, if you have a look at the release notes—is constantly growing and enhanced with new functionalities. That's why we now offer the final version of the Webserver Stress Tool with all its features as a freeware!

 
 

Tests You Can Run With the Webserver Stress Tool

To download the Webserver Stress Tool, just visit our “Networking Freeware” section. On this page we also offer various other free tools that enhance your networking experience. Within the detailed documentation of the Webserver Stress Tool you can learn about various reporting and logging features and the different tests you can run.

 

Here’s a quick overview:

  • Performance tests help you optimize your server settings or application configurations by querying single URLs of a webserver or web application. With this approach you can identify and discover elements that may be responsible for slower than expected performance.
  • Load tests enable you to test your entire website at the normal (expected) load. Simply enter the URLs, the number of users, and the time between clicks of your website traffic to start this "real world" test.
  • Stress tests are a great tool to find the traffic threshold for your webserver. They simulate excessive load to your webserver, which could, for example, be caused by a new advertising campaign.
  • Ramp tests let you determine the maximum number of users your webserver can accommodate before producing error messages.
  • Various other tests help you gain deeper insights into your website, for example, to make sure your web pages can be requested simultaneously without problems with database deadlocks, semaphores, etc.

So what are you waiting for? Download your free Webserver Stress Tool and share the good news with your friends and colleagues, who might be interested in testing the performance of their webservers for free!

Note: As a result of making the Webserver Stress Tool a freeware offering, we won't be able to provide deep technical support for it anymore. Please feel free to post your questions in the Paessler Knowledge Base and to answer questions of other users yourself.
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