Sometimes we are tasked with testing backend services, application program interfaces (APIs), or some other components that may not necessarily have a graphical user interface (GUI) attached to it, for example, a classic web application. At such times, the measure of the responsiveness of the module, for example, will be how many transactions per second it can withstand before slowness is observed. For example, transactions per second (TPS) is useful information for stakeholders who are providing services that can be consumed by various third-party components or other services. Good examples of these include the Google search engine, which can be consumed by third-parties, and the Twitter and Facebook APIs, which allow developers to integrate their application with Twitter and Facebook respectively.

The transactions per second listener extension component from the JMeter plugins project allows us to measure the transactions per second. It plots a chart of...