This Is How We Test Our Performance With JMeter
JMeter is an open-source, highly extensible application tool that helps to perform an application’s load test and stress test on the application’s static pages and dynamic resources as well as to perform functional tests to measure performance. It helps to measure and understand the application’s performance under different settings in order to ensure the software delivery is going to be robust. With the Apache JMeter, you can simulate a heavy load on a server or group of servers, database, or network and test its strength to analyze the overall web app performance under different load types.
Why Do We Need Performance Testing?
Functional and nonfunctional testing are both critical steps in the race among software vendors to bring the application to market quickly. Properly executed tests will provide you with the peace of mind that your application will be high-quality, bug-free, and will perform as you desire and as your customer would expect them to.
Performance testing is essential to ensure that the product will perform well i.e., it would meet expected performance under high traffic load. Performance testing will help you to understand how many concurrent users your website can handle. It is crucial, for example, if you want to assess if your website is expecting a traffic spike from many different locations around a campaign that you are planning, with these tests you can understand your limits and the highest threshold your application or website can handle. With the right assessment, you can decide to either limit your campaign or to go ahead with a higher server configuration to handle the extra traffic.
To assess how to best cope with situations of high-load and complex queries, we need a handy tool. A good tool will help us to easily test and understand if the application will perform well under the expected workload and whether it meets standard benchmarks on both load and stress — the number of expected concurrent users on the website or web application.
How To Do The Performance Testing Of An Application?
There are two types of testing – functional and nonfunctional testing. In functional testing, we test if the application is working as per the business requirements concerning its functionality such as design, usability, mainline functions, access conditions, and error conditions, etc. But in nonfunctional testing, we are concerned with testing how robust the application will perform – whether the application has bugs in its code that can lead to application failure, and how it is going to cope with high traffic conditions.
There are many tools such as JMeter, Gatling, Locust, Goad for managing and testing the applications. Below, we will take a look at one of the most popular testing tools available that developers use today – Apache JMeter.
What Is Apache JMeter?
Apache JMeter was initially developed to test web applications only, but over the past decade, it has expanded to include other areas as well.
Setting Up Apache JMeter For Test
1-Firstly, you need to install JRE. You can do that from here
2-Then you need to go ahead and download JMeter from here
3-Unzip the JMeter file and install it into the directory where you want
4-Launch JMeter in GUI or non-GUI mode
5-Create Test Plan
6-Add Components to your test plan
7-Run Tests and View Performance Reports
What Are JMeter’s Strengths?
With many tools available in the market today, JMeter has established itself as one of the most preferred by testers all over the globe. With Apache JMeter, you can test the performance of static resources such as HTML as well for dynamic elements such as JSP and AJAX.
Apache JMeter has several advantages which make it a tool of choice
- It is Open Source and built on JAVA. It is platform-independent. With a large community of active users, it is very easy to find answers to developer queries on the discussion forums.
- Apache JMeter is very user-friendly, with a very comprehensive Graphical User Interface. Hence it is effortless to add and remove elements. It is possible to run your entire test without having to do any hands-on coding.
- Apache JMeter can be used to run a wide variety of tests such as functional testing as well as nonfunctional testing such as stress tests, distribution tests, web services tests.
- Apache JMeter comes with robust support documentation to help the user during each step, from the stage of installing and configuring test settings to generating reports.
- Apache JMeter gives you the chance to design different test scenarios and perform them using either GUI or non-GUI mode (from command line).
- JMeter provides rich performance reports with detailed graphs, charts, and other visualization tools to aid users in understanding the test performance in great detail.
What’s Next?
Testing the application will help you come up with an assessment of how to optimize your infrastructure is. In case you need to prepare to handle high expected traffic, then you may need to invest in additional server resources.
In many cases, a Content Delivery Network will be the best solution for your needs. You can use a CDN along with your application to offload your origin’s load, which will cache your website content within a network of strategically placed servers all over the world. By caching the content when the user requests for a piece of information on your web app or website, then it will be served from the cached storage closest to them.
This way, not only the round trip time will be reduced, but also it will reduce the load on your origin server, helping you to utilize your resources even under high-traffic conditions efficiently. A CDN also provides other benefits such as the prevention of DDoS attacks, which can be catastrophic for you, especially if they occur in peak traffic situations. Scalability is another significant benefit that a CDN offers. With a CDN, you can quickly scale up and down as per your traffic requirements.
Hence, you don’t have to invest a considerable amount upfront to purchase additional physical servers, which are going to demand maintenance and operating costs even when they are not utilized to their full capacity.
At Medianova, we provide global CDN solutions in streaming, encoding, caching, micro caching, hybrid CDN, and website acceleration. We have delivered and managed CDNs for leading enterprises and our state-of-art solutions are benchmarked against industry-leading quality parameters.
Get in touch with us to learn more about how Medianova can build and manage a dedicated CDN for you.
