New way of conducting web performance testing

It has been long time that performance testing meaning commercial tools like LoadRunner from Mercury, later added Avalanche from Spirent and IxLoad from Ixia.

However, none of the traditional tools can handle:

• Complicated web transactions
• Different OS/Browser behaviors

Now, with some recent (cloud-computing based) developments; there are few alternatives that one can leverage other people's infrastructure and conduct vast load of testing (while still pricy):

• Gomez.com
• BrowserMob
• utest.com

These tools/sites are also providing other tests as monitoring/alert services that could also be add-on values for live traffic. However, I like the easy way to add thousands of real web-traffic.

Also, as cloud-computing is getting more popular and one can hope the price will drop down more soon!