How do I do load test  for a mobile application. Load runner does not support mobile applications it seems. Are there any open source tools available to simulate load for mobile applications?

Check Enteros Load2Test -  http://www.enteros.com/products_load2test.htm Load2Test captures real production workload for load testing playback, simulating thousands of users for top down testing or mobile back-end testing at the database component layer. Also available in the Amazon EC2, RackSpace or PlatformLabs cloud environments. Integrated performance management and root cause analysis system automatically collects performance metrics across load test infrastructure and applies cross-component correlation to identify performance degradations and bottlenecks. In addition to database load testing, Load2Test provides powerful baseline load testing functionlity, such as web site load testing, Citrix load testing and UI or GUI load testing. Extensible API for load testing agents enables easy support for load testing of custom protocols

Either you're doing it wrong, you don't understand how mobile applications transmit data, or you're trying to test client-side stuff with a tool that's not designed to do client side testing. Check out the bottom link on this page & see if that helps you clarify your question. http://scott-barber.blogspot.com/p/articles-columns-papers-books-by-scott.html

Hi, Your tool selection needs to take into account the following points : - Ability to record the trafic on all kind of devices ( Androids, IOS, Windows Phone, and others) on HTTP , HTTPS and websocket - Network emulation: Running load test on mobile architecture without including the network constraints of the real users doesn't make sence. it is very important to select a tool allowing you to emulate network such as 3G, 4G..etc and customize the constraints by setting the latency, packet loss, bandwidth limitation of the real mobile user - Cloud integration: Often mobile application has significant load ( it depends of the business) , so it is important to have the ability to easily start on demand Cloud based Load Generator located in different Geos. With that kind of features, you won't have to worry about installation or configuration of any kind of extra components. - Productivity: The mobile developpment life cycle are much more shorter compare to normal web application. So it means that you will have less time to run your test . So the productivity is very important when it comes to performance mobile testing. So i would recommend to select a GUI driven tool to be able to create your scenario in a shorter time. Do you see other points??

You might want to check out SandStorm- An automated load testing tool that effectively tests the server side performance of mobile applications. More details- http://sandstorm.impetus.com/mobile_performance_testing