JMeter properties are defined in jmeter.properties, which is global in nature and used to define some defaults that JMeter uses. The value of the remote_hosts property encountered in the previous chapter is a good example of this. Properties can be referenced from within a test plan, but cannot be used for thread-specific values because of their global nature (shared among all threads).
JMeter variables, on the other hand, are local to each thread. The values may stay the same or vary between threads. In cases where a variable is updated by a thread, only the thread copy of the variable is changed, thus remaining invisible to other running threads. A good example of this is the Regular Expression Extractor post processor we encountered in the previous chapters. The values extracted and acted upon are in the context of the samples of the running thread. The variables that are extracted are user-defined and available to the whole test plan at startup. If the...