31 May 09 Performance measurement with JMeter 2.3.3

Last week was launched a new release of JMeter. JMeter 2.3.3 is a powerful java application designed to do web application functionality testing and performance measurement, allowing you to do powerful server stress tests.
I have been doing some practices with it and I really liked the easy way you can set up a test plan and start stressing your machines to check response times when lot’s of threads are doing requests.

You just need to create a .jmx file wich will contain all the information needed to do the requests. Host name, port number, protocol, method, url path, url variables… You can actually tell JMeter to read the url variables from an external .dat file. It will allow you to give different values to the variables for each request.
The .jmx can be written manually but it’s much easier to create it via the JMeter’s GUI.

You will have to tell JMeter the number of threads that must be executing requests and the number of requests per thread. It allows you to leave the threads making requests indefinitely.
Once a test is launched you can see in real time the number of samples that have been executed and the Deviation, Throughput, Average and Median of the requests done by the threads (think of a thread as a user doing a request via browser).

This is just how to do a basic test plan but the application is really more complete than this and has much more interesting features.

Tags: Java, JMeter, Open source