[lbriner]

It depends exactly what you mean by performance testing. The problem with a lot of UI tests is that you might need to add artificial slowness to make the tests more likely to pass. Even waiting for something to appear can take longer than it would in a browser. If you want a basic number to see regression, sure you can use this.

If you want to get a sense of how far the system can scale, you would be better with a proper performance testing framework that can run multiple threads, ideally from multiple locations (to avoid any network limits) and built-in support for accurate timing. Apache Bench is pretty common and relatively easy to setup and use. There is also JMeter and even SaaS services to do it for you.

[ericb]

> The problem with a lot of UI tests is that you might need to add artificial slowness to make the tests more likely to pass.

For most real-world performance tests, you should be adding plenty of delay. The average delay on the web between pages for real users runs around 50 seconds, last I looked (which was a while ago, admittedly).

If your app uses keepalives, or polling, or websockets, running your users really fast is going to make your test less accurate and you may get a false positive.