Over the past few weeks I had been tasked with load testing various types of Citrix servers.  After struggling on with the “industry standard” Mercury Loadrunner I thought there must be something better and had a scout about. Here’s what I found…

Mercurys Loadrunner was already available in the company I was doing some work for so it made sense to try the Load testing on that. After installation it’s just a matter of running through the actions you want it to copy and the script is created. Once done you can modify the script to allow wait times etc. After speaking to their support and finding that it’s unreliable on any client newer than 8.1 (how old!!) I was already not impressed particularly because it costs around £16,000 for a controller license and then you still need lots more on top. The scripts were taking a long time as it didn’t seem to follow what I was doing despite following all their guidelines so it meant a lot of stopping and manually adding more to the script each time. It was around this time I went looking elsewhere and came across ThinGenius.
All of a sudden things got better. The software can be installed on a PC so as not to affect the server load, then like LoadRunner you hit record and you’re away. Difference with this software is it’s specifically designed for Citrix and more importantly I worked away on the software for a good half an hour and the script worked first time. Tried another one and it worked again. The price tag is sensible too (around £3300 for 100 users). I had to stick a quick blog up about this product just because I was so impressed with it. On the downside however it’s only for Citrix. If you want to load test your Microsoft Terminal Servers this product is not for you.  By the way, I trialed this on presentation server 4 and 4.5 both with the latest ICA client.
 
I was going to write a quick overview of the components and installation detail for this product but it’s already been done in detail here.