I was given a demo of a Loadrunner type application today and it looked quite useful and very powerful

Apparently you don’t need to do any coding at all, but I find that hard to believe. All you have to do is point it at a URL and get testing. I asked the guy giving the demo how many virtual users it could simulate, and he said there was no limit. That got me thinking. I asked him so you could just point it at Amazon.com, simulate a couple of 100 million users, dragging Amazon down to its knees, via what it would think was a denial of service attack and you would end up in jail. The guy responded that when his company used it in anger they did so with the express permission of the web sites company and usually in the middle of the night when it wouldn’t cause to much grief (Not an international company then? He-he. Ed). Well that’s fine but if it did get into the wrong hands and those hands could hide their IP address, jeez doesn’t bear thinking about.

There is a demo version that you can download and run and it’s limited to about five users so I might try that and see just how little code I really do have to write to automate buying something from Amazon. No that’s not a good idea as I might end up buying something I don’t want or even worse multiple copies of something I don’t want. Maybe I’ll try something really easy first.

I did try downloading it onto Vista but needless to say there isn’t a Vista version available.