From: Kyle Schmitt <kyleaschmitt@...>
Date: 2009-04-11T22:39:05+09:00
Subject: Re: load testing tool - Please advise?

Well, if you think about it, what does the server care about?  Sending
data, and receiving commands.

As far as it's concerned, there is no difference between firefox opera
and a 15 line ruby script, as long as a program asks  for the same
files, and sends the right commands.

If your goal is to test the web application server under load, that's
what you want.  You don't care if something isn't displayed right, or
if javascript does what it's supposed to, because the server doesn't
care.  You test all of those things: javascripts working right,
rendering, does this drop down show up at the right spot, does this
form work like we expect, etc; using watir or browser based tests.
You test for performance and concurrency problems etc using stress
tests.  For instance, you want to test that 100 users simultaneously
submitting a new recipe to your "biscuit enthusiast" site will
actually take the submissions, and not crash with a mysql error.

It's two different types of tests, using two different types of tools.