JMeter for Stress Testing Web Applications

When it's time to deploy your web application in the real world, it's a good idea to simulate the amount of the traffic that your server is expected to support. It's not really possible to coordinate all of your co-workers to click "OK" all at the same time, so luckily, there are some software tools out there that can do this for you.

The backbone in most load testing applications, is the "script", or list of server commands that need to be sent from multiple "virtual users" at the same time, or close to the same time. Each virtual user theoretically represents one actual user, so it is important to try to model a real world situation.

I've recently done some research on stress testing applications. A lot of larger companies use LoadRunner, which seems to be the industry leader. After seeing this product in action, it is indeed very powerful, but it is very expensive.

JMeter, a product provided by the Apache Jakarta Project, might be just as good as LoadRunner, and instead of $20,000, it's free.

Both of these tools have features that automatically record a user's action, and extract out the server calls, to create the script. In JMeter, the recording is performed through it's HTTP Proxy feature. Once the proxy server is set up, you configure your Web Browser to point to this proxy, this way, all of the web-browser's requests are routed through the proxy for recording.

Once the recording is done, you now have the basis for your load test script. You can set up hundreds of users to make the same server calls you did when you were using the browser.

-Alex

Comments

[bank]

hi, there
i am intern as QA now. could you help me
I would like to load testing an Applet

how could we do that ..
or any suggestion , comments

bank_iup At hotmail

[Alex Harm]

bank,

JMeter works well as a server-side load-testing utility. If your applet is the front-end of a client-server application, then you could use JMeter's Proxy engine in conjunction with your applet to develop the appropriate scripts.

If your applet is more of a stand-alone application (with no connection to the backend), then you might want to look into a tool more suited for automated GUI testing, perhaps something like Abbot - http://abbot.sourceforge.net/doc/overview.shtml

[Bank]

Oh, thanks
Finally I search with google and found your blog again accidentally !

Thanks again