PAL, which stands for Performance Analysis of Logs, is a free tool for pulling apart Microsoft log files (IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, Active Directory) and analyzing them. The tool generates HTML reports based on recommended performance counters and shows when thresholds for those counters have been exceeded. You can also setup your own custom thresholds in the tool.

Fiddler is a Proxy which logs HTTP/HTTPS traffic. You can set breakpoints, change data, and perform event-based scripting. Fiddler is freeware and works with just about any browser.

LiveHTTPHeaders is a Firefox plugin for viewing and manipulating HTTP headers. From the site:

The goal of this project is to adds information about the HTTP headers in two ways:

• First by adding a 'Headers' tab in 'View Page Info' of a web page.


• Second by adding a tool in the 'Tools->Web Development' menu to be able to display http headers in real time (while pages are being downloaded from the Internet.


• Third by letting you edit request headers and replay an URL (beta). Look for the Replay button in the live window!

This project may be of some help for the following:

• Help debugging web application.


• See which kind of web server the remote site is using.


• See the cookies sent by remote site.

I've found it to be handy when creating performance test scripts or when trying to debug a script.

Occasionally, I'll have need to translate text from one language to another for testing purposes. I don't do a lot of internationalization testing, but many sites today have simple text referencing an alternative language (like Spanish in the United States). For simple text conversion, I've found Google Language Tools to be quite useful. It's not going to let you take up that new project in a language you don't speak, but it might get you by in a pinch.

If you do performance testing on a regular basis, and you've not used JMeter yet, you need to give it a try. It's free, open source, and very lightweight. I find it's well suited to many of the day-to-day performance test projects, and because it's lightweight I can make new tests and changes to tests quickly.

From the website:

Apache JMeter is open source software, a 100% pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions.

Apache JMeter may be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more). It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types. You can use it to make a graphical analysis of performance or to test your server/script/object behavior under heavy concurrent load.