In a move that removes the limits from free load testing, Web Performance, Inc. has released Load Tester LITE, a free version of its popular Load Tester PRO 5 software. This new version can run test cases with up to 1,000,000 virtual users at no cost from user-hosted servers, or from cloud servers starting at just $1 per hour.

Load Tester LITE offers a number of features available in the company’s Load Tester PRO 5 software. But while Load Tester PRO 5 automates load testing on dynamic sites, the LITE version is designed to test the fundamental aspects of website performance that are usually overlooked, including raw bandwidth, firewall and load balancer throughput, and especially single page load times.

“Recently one of our clients got listed on the Drudge Report and a single page got millions of hits in a short period of time before the site crashed”, explains Web Performance founder Michael Czeiszperger.  “We thought it would be cool to provide a free service that could test for this simple scenario so websites could make sure their site wouldn’t be crushed when their page views go through the roof.”

The unprecedented 1,000,000 concurrent user tests with Load Tester LITE are made possible by the Amazon EC2 cloud combined with an extremely efficient and accurate load generation system.

“We’ve optimized our load generation to simulate up to 3,000 concurrent users per load engine in the cloud while retaining incredible accuracy”, says Web Performance president Michael Czeiszperger. “We did this by completely rewriting the I/O stack from the byte level up to be more efficient when generating loads. The accuracy of the simulated users is maintained using a proprietary load-generation balancing and monitoring algorithm specifically designed for the cloud.”

For more complex sites, Load Tester PRO 5 offers the same unlimited user testing, along with the ability to automatically measure how many users a website can handle, no hand coding required, dynamic field configuration and support for today’s leading web technologies and popular web platforms.