Performance testing is an essential part of the development of, for instance, large public web sites.

Performance testing presents similar challenges as integration testing. We need a testing system that is similar to a production system in order for the performance test data to be useful to make a forecast about real production system performance.

The most commonly used performance test is load testing. With load testing, we measure, among other things, the response time of a server while the performance testing software generates synthetic requests for the server.

Apache JMeter is an example of a an open source application for measuring performance. While it's simpler than its proprietary counterparts, such as LoadRunner, JMeter is quite useful, and simplicity is not really a bad thing.

JMeter can generate simulated load and measure response times for a number of protocols, such as HT, LDAP, SOAP, and JDBC.

There is a JMeter Maven plugin, so you can run JMeter as part of...