Hi Bhushan,

It is definitely possible to do Performance testing Manually but the percentage of Companies / People doing so would really be negligible since Performance testing tools have come into the fore.

The disadvantage of doing Perf testing manually would be you would never be able to simulate the exact load at the given instance. Reason being users operating manually would differ in their working speeds, synchronization etc. Also we would require as many number of machine where AUT would be deployed.

We could measure Page Download time, Response times, Memory usage, Disk Usage etc manually. Perfmon is an windows inbuilt monitoring tool to measure various performance metrics.

Perf testing using Automation tools like QTP is definitely possible and is being carried out by companies who cannot afford licenses of tools like LoadRunner.

Using QTP we could record functionality and play back the same at differnet machines to simulate simultaneous load. You can also playback QTP scripts using Termimal emulator to create more Vusers per script.

A better option would be to procure tools like LoadRunner or Open Source tools like OpenSTA.

Cheers.....