In this chapter, we discussed the reasons why we should monitor the health of our GeoServer instances. We explored how to install and configure GeoServer's monitor extension so that GeoServer logs the map requests made to it. We also looked at how Apache JMeter™ can be used to construct and execute test plans to place loads on our servers so that we can analyze the results and gain an understanding of how well our servers perform.

Performance testing is the key to having an optimized, responsive, and healthy GeoServer implementation. The real art of testing is devising tests in such a way that they are representative of the real-world scenario in which we think our server will be used. For example, it is not much use to simply set the test to create 100 concurrent users immediately and start hammering the server. By gradually introducing the load, and introducing small delays between each request to simulate user habits, we will get a much better reflection of how our server will...