Book Image

Performance Testing with JMeter 2.9

By : Bayo Erinle
Book Image

Performance Testing with JMeter 2.9

By: Bayo Erinle

Overview of this book

Performance testing with JMeter 2.9 is critical to the success of any software product launch and continued scalability. Irrespective of the size of the application's user base, it's vital to deliver the best user experience to consumers. Apache JMeter is an excellent testing tool that provides an insight into how applications might behave under load enabling organizations to focus on making adequate preparations. Performance Testing with JMeter 2.9 is a practical, hands-on guide that equips you with all the essential skills needed to effectively use JMeter to test web applications using a number of clear and practical step-by-step guides. It allows you take full advantage of the real power behind Apache JMeter, quickly taking you from novice to master. Performance Testing with JMeter 2.9 begins with the fundamentals of performance testing and gets you acquainted with JMeter. It will guide you through recording realistic and maintainable scripts. You will acquire new skills working with tools such as Vagrant, Puppet, and AWS, allowing you to leverage the cloud to aid in distributed testing. You will learn how to do some BeanShell scripting and take advantage of regular expressions, JMeter properties, and extension points to build comprehensive and robust test suites. Also, you will learn how to test RESTful web services, deal with XML, JSON, file downloads/uploads, and much more. Topics like resource monitoring, distributed testing, managing sessions, and extending JMeter are also covered. Performance Testing with JMeter 2.9 will teach you all you need to know to take full advantage of JMeter for testing web applications, dazzle your co-workers, and impress your boss! You will go from novice to pro in no time.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 2. Recording Your First Test

JMeter comes with a built-in proxy server (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server) to aid you record test plans. The proxy server, once configured, watches your actions as you perform operations on a website, creates test sample objects for them and eventually stores them in your test plan; that is, a JMX file. JMeter gives you the option of creating test plans manually, but this is mostly impractical for recording most testing scenarios. You will save a whole lot of time using the proxy recorder, as you will see in a bit.

So without further ado, let's record our first test! For this, we will record the browsing of JMeter's own official website as a user would normally do. For the proxy server to be able to watch your actions, it will need to be configured. This entails two steps:

  1. Setting up the HTTP proxy server within JMeter.

  2. Setting the proxy in the browser.