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)

Using timers in your test plan


By default, JMeter doesn't put timers in your test plans when a scenario is recorded. This is far from reality. Ideally, users will have a think or wait time between page views and requests. Getting JMeter to simulate such pauses or waits makes your test plans more realistic, bringing it closer to how actual users might behave. JMeter offers various built-in timer components that help achieve this. Each varies from the others in how it varies the simulated pauses. The following is a list of included timers as of the time of writing.

The Constant timer

The Constant timer is used if you want each thread to pause for the same amount of time between requests.

The Gaussian random timer

The Gaussian random timer pauses each thread request for a random amount of time with most of the time intervals occurring near a particular value. The total delay is the sum of the Gaussian distributed value times, the value specified, and the offset.

The Uniform random timer

The Uniform...