can we use TestComplete Distributed Testing to perform small-scale load testing, e.g. ~5-10 clients?
You can run as many instances as you want (on separate machines/VM's of course). But they each require a license. Which unless you already have them, is an expensive way to performance test. Even at low numbers ....
Synchronizing them should be easy enough. Either built a "wait for time" routine in at the start. Or start them on a scheduler.
It's the cost effectiveness (when there is plenty freeware load test software out there) I'd be more concerned about ....
Oh it does. There will be a way of simulating it. But full workflow, with dependencies, can be a lot trickier to set up in headless load test software.
We've used jMeter for standard web, AJAX, sockets, binary, etc etc. But some of these were a real pig to set up! Especially the ones with inter-worker dependencies. (Which is where I discovered the joy of hash maps to share info between thread groups in jMeter!)
(I do performance work as well as automation ...)
(On the rare occasion we've needed full browser use to properly test, we have an in-house solution build using python, selenium, AWS and Azure which can run up to 3000 virtualised machines, each using a full browser ... and doesn't cost much to run.)
