Alexander Podelko's Performance Testing Links

Load Testing

Organizations

The Workshop on Performance and Reliability (WOPR)

Publications

Software Test & Performance Magazine

Better Software Magazine

Sites

Scott Barber's site don't miss Publications and Presentations

LoadTester.com includes library and articles, mainly for LoadRunner

Microsoft's Patterns & Practices Performance Testing Guidance project

StickyMinds.com testing portal, there are performance testing papers

QA Forums includes "Performance & Load Testing" and many load testing tools forums and QALinks

Wilson Mar's performance testing notes

Performance Testing : KnowledgeBase from Roland Stens

CMG conference proceedings from 1997 through 2005 a unique collection of papers about capacity planning, performance engineering, and performance management

Keynote Resource Library has some interesting white papers (you need to fill a form to get them) as well as description of their performance management services

Jim Pensyl's performance testing site

Dan Downing / Mentora white papers

Load/Performance Testing Resources from LogiGear

Tools and articles from PushToTest (SOA testing) and Frank Cohen's blog

White Papers from CSS (ReadyTestGo)

The world's only blog on load testing by Stuart Moncrieff, a lot of good LoadRunner info

Jason Harris' "Captain LoadTest" Blog

Corey Goldberg's Blog

Also check load testing tool vendor's sites for white papers (usually registration required)

Generic

See about Performance Requirements are in the Performance Design section

Wikipedia about Software Performance Testing

Load Testing Terminology by Scott Stirling

Introduction to Performance Testing; The Who, What, Where, When and Why by Scott Barber

Testing for performance Part 1: Assess the problem space Part 2: Build out the test assets Part 3: Provide information by Michael Kelly

Template: Load Test Plan by Rajeev J (some things are LoadRunner-specific)

Effective Load Testing see pp.33-39

The Top 13 Mistakes in Load Testing Applications by Mark D. Anderson

Performance Methodology, Terminology and Concepts Tutorial from Intel

Performance Testing Case Study, Part 1: Developing the Test Strategy by Ross Collard

Getting Things Done: Practical Web/e-Commerce Application Stress Testing by Robert Sabourin

Load Testing, Benchmarking, and Application Performance Management for the Web by Daniel A. Menascé

Load Testing of Web Sites by Daniel A. Menascé

Scott Barber's interview

Getting a Diagnosis With .NET by Joe Fernandes, see pp. 33-36

High Performance Testing by Scott Barber

Tester PI: Performance Investigator by Scott Barber

Critical Success Factors for Load Test Projects by Mark McWhinney

Tuning Your Stress Test Harness by Kirk Pepperdine

Tales from the Lab: Best Practices in Application Performance Testing by Ellen Friedman

Real-World Load Testing Tips to Avoid Bottlenecks When Your Web App Goes Live by Jeff Dunmall and Keith Clarke

An introduction to non-functional testing by Stuart Reid and Julian Harty

Performance testing Java servlet-based Web applications: A guide for software test engineers by Len DiMaggio

A metric for predicting the performance of an application under a growing workload by E. J. Weyuker and A. Avritzer

Analyzing Performance-Testing Results to Correlate Performance Plateaus and Stress Areas by Michael Kelly.

Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks Exposed! by Daniel Downing, see pp.20-26

How to Identify the Usual Performance Suspects by Scott Barber, see pp.20-29

Diagnosing Symptoms of Poor System Performance by Scott Barber, see pp.14-20

Rapid Bottleneck Identification, white paper from Empirix, nothing is Empirix-specific

Load Testing Tools

Load Testing Tools by Wilson Mar

I am aware about four "universal" (supporting multiple protocols) load testing tools :

HP LoadRunner (former Mercury)
          Wilson Mar's LoadRunner notes
          Wilson Mar's scripting notes
          Yahoo Group
          Dmitry Motevich's blog
          SAP Cheat Sheet for Performance Testers by Stuart Moncrieff
           Performance Testing Citrix Applications Using LoadRunner: Citrix Virtual User Best Practices by Tim Chase
           Oracle Performance Testing by Caleb Billingsley
           LoadRunner Winsock Tutorial
          Performance Testing, LoadRunner Tips&Tricks blog
          Using LoadRunner for Unsupported or Difficult to Parameterize Protocols

Rational Performance Tester
           Rational manuals
           "User Experience, not Metrics" and "Beyond Performance Testing" by Scott Barber
           Custom Load Generation with Rational TestManager
           Using a LoadRunner workload as a model for a Rational workload by Yuriy Veytsman
           IBM Rational Performance Tester on Windows 2000 and Linux: A scalability comparison by Yuriy Veytsman
           IBM Rational Performance Optimization Toolkit for Rational Performance Tester
           Use IBM Rational Testing Tools for Effective Performance Monitoring of Apache Web Servers by Matthew Adcock
           Michael Kelly's articles and presentations
           IBM Rational Performance Tester and IBM WebSphere MQ: Performing MQ data correlation through sockets by Francisco Sambade

Borland (former Segue) SilkPerformer. Good white papers.

Compuware QALoad

There are many specialised load testing tools, many for Web or database testing. See, for example:
http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html
http://testingfaqs.org/t-load.html

Oracle Load Testing for Web Applications (former Empirix e-Load) probably is the best-known Web-only commercial tool, several good white papers (Empirix still provides solutions for VoIP, IMS, and Contact Centers - Hammer; Empirix white papers).

Visual Studio 2008 (and 2005) Team System includes a load testing tool
Microsoft's Patterns & Practices Performance Testing Guidance project

WAPT is a load and stress testing tool for web interface, inexpensive ($350 per installation), free trial
WAPT 4.0: Web Site Load, Stress and Performance Testing

Here is the list of open source load testing tools:
http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php

A couple of open source tools that looks more mature:

OpenSTA Originally developed by Cyrano as a commercial tool. OpenSTA stands for Open Systems Testing Architecture. Another branch of the Cyrano code is a commercial tool QTest from Quotium.
OpenSTA versus LoadRunner by Andy O’Brien and Antony Marcano of etest associates
Danny Faught's review of OpenSTA in Open Testware Reviews

Apache JMeter
Load Testing your Applications with Apache JMeter by Keld H. Hansen
JMeter Links a big collections of links from JMeter site

Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform Project

Hardware appliances can be useful if it is necessary to simulate a big number of users with limited scripting requirements. For example, Spirent Avalanche, Antara FlameThrower, and Ixia products. By the way, Avalanche is integrated with Mercury LoadRunner "allowing you to generate large-scale, network-realistic load with Avalanche while performing sophisticated application load tests with LoadRunner."

Comparisons

An Overview of Load Test Tools by Julien Buret and Nicolas Droze (2003), includes OpenSTA, DieselTest, TestMaker, Grinder, LoadSim, JMeter, LoadTest, Rubis

Load Test Tools Evaluation by Abraham Jacob et al. (2002)

Stress, Load, Volume, Performance, Benchmark and Base Line Testing Tool Evaluation and Comparison by Cordell Vail

Related Tools

Shunra Software products allow real network simulation during load testing. Integrated with LoadRunner.

iTrinegy (former Itheon) WAN / Network emulation