The short answer is that tools like watir are great for UI automation and validating end user experience under load. I sometimes use watirgrid to help drive multiple browsers fom different locations.
But to generate significant load in terms of things like concurrency/throughput it's much more cost effective to use protocol based tools that can spawn many threads for a given process. We like using jmeter, httperf, siege, grinder etc In terms of monitoring load I like to keep that separate from the load generation tool itself but we've had success using tools like splunk and more recently logstash to help munge all that disparate data. I'll finish by plugging watirgrid.com, my company altentee.com/about and my experiment gridinit.com :) -- Before posting, please read http://watir.com/support. In short: search before you ask, be nice. [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/watir-general [email protected]
