HTTPPerf is a tool for measuring Web service performance. The problem is it hadn't been updated since 2000, even though there had been numerous bug reports in the intervening seven years. Theodore Bullock, recently of the University of Calgary, reported on a project to fix reported bugs and redo the build system, making it more portable that a Software Engineering class carried out last year. The result is version 0.9 is is freely available.

There are plugins that do sessions and Web log playback. Others could be written. For example, I'd like to see a plugin that incorporates Rhino and does Javascript evaluation as part of the testing.

Theodore is working on future versions. Version 1.0 will include support for loading multiple servers, IPv6, providing structured data output via XML, and HTTP Basic Authentication support. Plans for version 1.1 include a GUI interface to manage experiments, server statistical load measurement, support for multiple sessions and cookies, and XML descriptions of workload. (Theodore's slides)