Assuring the best results from Performance Testing – an evaluation of the tool Apache JMeter

Outages!

That’s a term that most of application owners are scared of. Imagine if there’s a huge outage on the day of your big promotion or the application falls flat on the day of an important client demo. These are realities that can you cannot wish away. Yes, you are thinking right that performance testing is the solution. It is no longer a best practice but it has become a necessity.

So the performance of any application or software is one of the key factors to influence user experience. It impacts user adoption, conversion, retention and even customer loyalty.

Before we delve into the subject of JMeter, let’s try to understand what performance testing is and how can it can help a software. The purpose of performance testing is to evaluate if the speed and efficiency of the network, system, device or software is as expected. It helps to answer key questions like if the system will be able to manage the load (it is meant to) on a daily, weekly and monthly basis or what happens in case of an overload?

Talking of JMeter, it is an open source software that loads functional behavior and measures performance. It was industrialized by “Stefanno Mazzocchi”. In its early days, Jmeter was used for FTP or web application but now widely used for database server test, functional tests, and other tests. Its purpose is to assess the performance of web application and different services like server, or protocol types which include Web – HTTP, SOAP, FTP, HTTPS, Database via JDBC and LDAP.

What are the benefits of Jmeter?

• JMeter can be used to test performance of both static resources such as JavaScript and HTML, as well as dynamic resources, such as JSP, Servlets, and AJAX.
• It can determine maximum number of simultaneous users that your website can handle.
• JMeter offers a variety of graphical analyses of performance reports such as chart, table, tree and log file.
• Apache JMeter permits to perform functional, load, performance and regression tests on an application.
• It can be united with Bean Shell & Selenium for automated testing.
• Since JMeter is a pure Java desktop application, thus it can run on various platforms.
• JMeter has approachable GUI and does not take much time to get acquainted with.
• JMeter offer recording features that auto-generate scripts based on the user actions captured.
• This tool owns a highly extensible core which allows the fusion of plug-ins that can further improve its competences.
• JMeter generates and supplies its test plan in XML format. That specifies that we can build or create a test plan using a text editor.

There are a lot of people who mistake JMeter for a browser. It is important to understand that JMeter works at protocol level. JMeter looks like a browser in case of web-services and remote services (it even looks like multiple browsers). It does not perform all the actions supported by browsers. For example, JMeter does not execute the Javascript that is found on HTML pages and it does not even render the HTML pages as a browser. However, JMeter makes it possible to see the response as HTML etc. (the timings are not included in any samples). , and only one sample in one thread is ever displayed at a time).

If you wish to know more about JMeter or want to explore more about performance testing, you can get in touch with our software testing experts.