how do you stress test a wcf service

Question

What tools and techniques have you used for testing your wcf services? Where there any special considerations made for the type of hosting you used(ie windows service vs IIS vs WAS)?

Answer 1

WCF Load Test should be the right tool, however it seem to require Visual Studio Team System . I cannot confirm as the installer didn't work properly on my office machine.

wcfstorm seem also to do the job but it's not free (the lite version doesn't seem to have the load testing feature).

So far the best was to create it myself. Using some Stopwatch(), using an one threads per client. By varying the number of threads and the frequency of the calls I could get the average response time for example.

Answer 2

Check out the patterns & practices Performance Testing Guidance Project . Also check out this great blog posts; not specific to WCF, but you can carry over a lot of lessons. :)

I've heard some people use SO-Aware to load-test WCF.

Also, to comment on something Wernight said, to use WCFLoadTest, you do need at least the Test Edition of VSTS .

Finally, check out this KB page from Microsoft.