Watir for load testing? .. Or JMeter instead

Recently someone asked me if load testing was possible in Watir. I thought about it and envisaged the possibility of doing this, then the thought crossed my mind whether watir is really ideal for Load testing... Lets see,

- Ruby does have great multithreading capabilities which should make parallel processing easy, but then how will it compete with giants in load testing like Rational Performance Tester, Load Runner and VSTS. Well, it just would not be able to at this nascent stage since the others are commercially supported and Watir isn't and the development is solely in the hands of open source development.


- Watir does not have a result reporting mechanism like the other tools mentioned with the fancy graphs and the out of the box support for ramp up of users, creating multiple threads, latency reporting and throughput tests etc.

- Watir is for functional testing and not a load testing tool and the development emphasis is on getting things right for functional testing.

- I then did a google search and one interesting thread I got was at http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/183983. If the above doesn't convince you. Perhaps this will ;)


Conclusively, Watir is just not meant for load testing , just like we need a truck not a car for carrying heavy loads, lame example I know :P

Okay so what do I suggest??
I suggested that he work with JMeter, no licensing issues, out of the box load testing. It worked great. Ill cover my demo on it in another post perhaps...

~joviano_dias@hotmail.com