Review of WAPT

Disclosure: This is a paid review. Saying that, all our reviews are honest. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise.

What it is and who it is for

Web Application developers often dream of creating a globally popular app. Web designers are often willing their traffic to shoot sky high. But what happens if these dreams come true? Wouldn’t it be such a waste if the application/site ground to a halt when the masses started using it? Enter WAPT (Web Application Testing):

WAPT 4.0 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. You may test and analyze the performance characteristics under various load conditions to find bottlenecks of your web applications.

Why use such software?

The answer to this is simple. When your app/site gets popular; errors, delays and long load-times may start to occur due to strain on the server. The modern world only allows 5 seconds of fame so when you get there, you have to perform. Load-testing software can (amongst other things) simulate high-traffic strain on the server so that these glitches can be smoothed out ready for the real traffic.

Features

Without further ado, lets look at the more interesting features (full feature set):

The Essentials

Essentially, WAPT emulates a mass of users in a way which best describes real-world users. Erratic. The user of a site/app is often a strange beast and WAPT tries its best to replicate this.

Once the software has ‘used’ your site, a visual interface is presented to you containing stats, graphs and problem points so you can improve your code if necessary. Tests are then logged for future reference and comparison.

User Types

A definite plus point. I know many readers here have a passion for usability and user interaction. WAPT has the option of selecting different types of users to add to the stress test. It can, amongst other things simulate the stress test depending on how different users may have found your site or how they browse your site. It can include average user thinking time too. Full marks for the usability factors here.

Spreading the load

Rarely in the real world will traffic to a site be constant. Likewise, WAPT offers the tester the opportunity to slowly up the load in increments to test the app/site under various strains. This could predict the point(s) that problems could start to occur.

Conclusions

To be honest, I’d never thought of load testing seriously before today. After using WAPT I can honestly say that even for someone not-so-technical (like me), this piece of software can provide a valuable insight into how a site will perform under stress.  As the popularity of fadtastic increases, I can potentially see where problems will occur in the future.

One downside to WAPT is that it doesn’t appear to run natively on a Mac. (Correct me if I’m wrong, please.) In this is the case, it’s a blow to some Mac users who want to try this out.

But the feature that will stick in my mind is the ability to really probe your site with different styles of users in mind. Those who lack the ability to test websites in a broad sense could benefit here. Remember, the point in doing this is to make the experience great for the user.

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