I am looking for a tool that can simulate a complete browser request to a LAMP based site including downloading of images, etc.

Simple tools like curl and wget dont do that, but I was looking at ab it seems like it can. The tool I need has to be command line based so I can run it via cron and parse the output with a script.

Does anyone have any experience with ab (or any other tools)?

I am not looking for a load testing tool, although such a feature might be handy one day.

My main concern is that it simulates a real browser request as closely as possible. I do not need per object stats, though that would be helpful, but rather, simple stats like total time, time to first byte, etc.

Thanks!

.carbohydrate.

ab is a performance tool and only evaluates the HTTP headers it retrieves and the raw data sizes of retrieved objects. It
doesn't interpret the html it retrieves, so it cannot retrieve referenced objects. Are you sure wget doesn't work? what about:

for example:
is this what you're trying to do? it also seems that you're trying to benchmark each object. maybe I'm misunderstanding your goal.

curl and wget are retrieval tools. ab and others like httperf are performance tools.

thanks for the reply.

my goal is to make a simple script that measures the response time of a site and time to page load including all objects on the page. I just noticed that ab does not retrieve any of the content (images, css, etc).

The site is writting on the Rails framework.

Most http benchmark tools won't interpret htmls.

The only tool I've used that does what you want with decent automation/logging/recording support is httpwatch pro.

Sadly its an IE based plugin...

httpfox is for firefox, but it doesn't have the automation or logging/recording features.

You could try automating browsing with iMacros, filter through tcpdump or wireshark and parse the caps with say chaosreader or a custom script you write...kind of overkill but it should work.

There are SaaS offerings that does this btw. You might want to try out Gomez. We use them for our shop, its great...webmetrics does the same thing, but I think somewhat cheaper.

Hope this helps.

hey Kenoshi,

yes, Ive used Gomez and Keynote before, however for small sites it was hard to justify the per URL fee so I thought it'd be fun to try building my own tool that is good enough to get the basics.

I am playing with wget -p (thanks grepmasterd) and now jmeter as well. I found some articles on getting jmeter running through Ant.

How about using the Perl modules eg WWW::Mechanize http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/WWW...W/Mechanize.pm