Overview of Performance Testing Tools

In client/server applications, many users access the server application simultaneously. In such a case, the software has to be tested for its performance.
The server application continues to run on the server but only one or a few clients will be running the client application but on these client machines, many virtual users are simulated, effectively simulating an environment in which 100 users access the database.
Today many enterprise applications such as ERP software, web services, web sites, CRM software etc. need to be tested for performance testing. Performance testing is also called load testing or stress testing. These tools display the performance of the application using graphs and charts so that analysis will become easy. You can plot a graph which shows the response time as a function of the number of simultaneous users who access the database.
WAPT 6.0 is a load and stress testing tool that provides you with an easy-to-use, consistent and cost-effective way of testing web sites, web servers, and intranet applications with web interfaces. WAPT has a set of features to test web sites with dynamic content and secure HTTPS pages. It provides informative test results through descriptive graphs and reports.
The performance tools that are widely used in the software industry are Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner and Apache's JMeter.