There are times when you will need to put more load on the applications under test. Such load may be more than a single machine can handle normally due to resource limitations such as RAM, CPU, and so on. As such, to get the target load on the application under test, you will need to distribute your tests across multiple machines. This is what is referred to as distributed testing.

Distributed testing is a form of testing that allows tests to be distributed across multiple machines on a network to achieve a target load while still keeping test results accurate. The results from each machine are then combined into a single result to give a final report as we would have had in the case of running on a single machine.

In this chapter, we will detail how to run tests across multiple machines. We will begin by seeing how to manually configure distributed testing in JMeter with a master-slave setup, and then see how to effortlessly automate the configuration of as many machines as needed...