Tune your web application's performance

There are ways to test your web application's performance against different loads. Automated testing applications really helps in these way. Load testing, stress testing, regression testing, and unit testing. All of these tests can be automatized using tools. Here is the open source/free web application testing tools;

• JMeter - used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more). It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types. You can use it to make a graphical analysis of performance or to test your server/script/object behavior under heavy concurrent load.
• ab - is a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving.
• Web Application Stress Tool - The Microsoft WAS web stress tool is designed to realistically simulate multiple browsers requesting pages from a web site. You can use this tool to gather performance and stability information about your web application. This tool simulates a large number of requests with a relatively small number of client machines. The goal is to create an environment that is as close to production as possible so that you can find and eliminate problems in the web application prior to deployment.