Benchmarking the environment of a new network is a crucial part of ensuring its success when it goes live. This includes stress testing and generating traffic on existing networks, both of which help you to identify any potentially flawed or vulnerable areas—for example, drops in connection and packet loss. As we know, network traffic is critical to the success of a business, as it determines how data flows and how effectively your applications interact.

For end users online today, speed and efficiency are everything. A customer isn’t likely to stick around if they experience a significant lag on their end, or if a page is unresponsive. In this thriving digital age, end users have information and services at their fingertips, with rapid access. If they fail to get what they want from you quickly, they’re likely to seek out another organization to meet their needs more effectively.

RoboHydra is a testing tool for HTTP-based clients (ie. Software that makes HTTP requests). The idea is, instead of connecting your clients-under-test to the real server, you connect them to RoboHydra and make RoboHydra respond with whatever you need for each request. You can test many different kinds of clients. While Badboy offers some elementary load testing features, to do real stress testing you often need much more. Rather than trying to offer all of the features of a complete load testing product, Badboy integrates with a free, open source product called JMeter. Run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more. Free performance, load, and stress test for web servers (Discontinued) Webserver Stress Tool is a powerful HTTP-client/server test application designed to pinpoint critical performance issues in your website or web server that may prevent optimal experience.

With a network traffic generator tool or network traffic simulator, you’re able to mimic actual network traffic. These tools simulate stress or load to establish how much the network can handle. By doing so, they give you a clear understanding of what your network can cope with, where the areas of concern are, and at what point the network becomes congested.

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While this is important for every business, it’s especially fundamental to businesses with numerous branches needing to maintain constant communication via the wide area network (WAN). If links can’t take the load, then these systems can stop functioning entirely, making day-to-day business extremely delicate. By implementing a network saturation or stress test, you can quickly identify any weaknesses so you can protect your daily activities from failure or downtime.

In this guide, I’ve ranked my favorite network traffic generator tools, with SolarWinds^® WAN Killer Network Traffic Generator squarely at the top. A feature-heavy, intelligently designed, and super user-friendly tool, WAN Killer is part of SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset (ETS), a suite of utilities working together to provide everything a network administrator should need.

Before going into my picks for the best generator software, I’ll briefly outline how traffic generators and stress test tools work.

Basics of Traffic Generators

Traffic generators are a way of injecting traffic into a network for utilization by other devices.

A traffic generator is meant to look like a device on a network, so it can target devices in receipt of traffic. This means it will have a physical, typically higher-level address.

When implemented, a traffic generator attaches to the network via the same interface as other devices to establish brand-new packets. Certain traffic generators may also need to respond to traffic from other devices—for example, when they need to establish an Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) in an IP network or a TCP connection.

Basically, a traffic generator is a tool designed for evaluating the performance of devices under test or systems under test. Traffic generators send RAW packets through certain ports and collect the following data: jitter and latency values, lost packets, TX/RX rates, and out-of-order packets. A traffic generator might be used in a similar way to a bandwidth test utility and can also be used to create packets routed to the packet generator.

Basics of Simulator Stress Test Tools

There are some similarities between traffic generators and simulator stress test tools. The purpose of a simulator stress test tool is to test the performance of a network. When combined with a network traffic generator, it can give you insight into how a network will cope with varying levels of stress and load. A stress test tool can also be used to identify issues like slow-loading or unresponsive web pages.

There are three main types of load simulation: HTTP/S-based, real browser-based, and headless.

HTTP/S-based tests, which were popular earlier on in the digital age, involve the test driver executing service requests and parsing responses. This type of test ignores the client-side scripts associated with modern Web 2.0 applications. Overall, HTTP/S tests aren’t as useful anymore, because they can’t cope with complex use cases at the protocol level.
Headless browser-based load simulation was designed in response to the increase in Web 2.0 technologies. Initial headless browsers included HtmlUnit, SlimerJS, and PhantomJS. Headless browsers are usually built from WebKit, which is the engine driving both Chrome and Safari. There are several advantages associated with headless browsers, including the fact that they run quickly without requiring a heavy GUI. They offer realistic user simulation, too, which is a big benefit.
Real browser-based load simulation takes into account the fact that Web 2.0 applications tend to be bursting with JavaScript, Flash, CSS, and AJAX. If you don’t have a full browser, it’s impossible to track the actual end-to-end response times for the entire web page. This type of load testing lets you verify the functionality of the site and the speed received by the end user. A standard real browser-based performance test tool collects load times for CSS, images, JavaScript, and more.

Best Traffic Generator Tools

Below are my rankings for the best network traffic generators and network stress test software, free and paid. I’ve included tools to suit a range of organizational needs to help you find the one that’s right for you.

WAN Killer is bundled into SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset, a network software suite containing over 60 utilities. These have been designed to cover everything from network discovery and configuration to monitoring and troubleshooting. In addition to WAN Killer, SolarWinds ETS features a port scanner, SNMP sweep tool, switch port mapper, IP network browser, MAC address discovery, and ping sweep.

WAN Killer was designed to assist users in identifying and targeting specific network traffic. It does this by facilitating the generation of your own traffic. You can define a specific IP address or hostname, which the tool will then intentionally bombard with traffic. This process will give you insight into your network performance. You can even define the size and circuit bandwidth percentage, then create data for your WAN tests.

There’s much to like about this tool. You can proactively test network and load balancing by tracking UDP/TCP packets, which will give you insight into how your network performs under specific traffic load conditions, and you can study network activities without using real traffic. The tool takes a risk-free approach to interactively test connections and edit IP traffic, thereby generating the network load you’ve specified. WAN Killer is a flexible tool allowing you to adjust port numbers, packet size, and bandwidth percentage, as well as modify the Differentiated Services Code Point and Explicit Congestion Notification settings.

Once you’ve installed Engineer’s Toolset, you can access WAN Killer by visiting the Diagnostics folder. The launch process is quick and easy. Because WAN Killer supports application-wide settings, you won’t need to adjust settings every time network traffic is generated.

A massive benefit of Engineer’s Toolset is the quantity of tools it delivers. When combined, these tools enable you to effectively manage, troubleshoot, and monitor your entire network. Each one is easily accessible and contained within a single desktop console. There are some truly impressive tools in this bundle. Aside from WAN Killer, I particularly like

Free Web Server Stress Test Tool