Apache JMeter (Performance Testing Tool)
By: Gandharv Madan
Tags: Jmeter, Apache, Testing, Quality Assurance, Performance

Today, we are living in an era where everything is almost digital, Demand of websites and their users are increasing at a very fast pace, seamless user experience is a must-have for organizations because of unnecessary delays in the response of the website. Your website traffic also depends on the response time (the total amount of time it takes to respond to a request for service).

(Apache JMeter)

“A slow website results in bad user experience(UX) and has a negative financial impact also. Even delay of 1 single second, for a longer period of time, may directly result in huge revenue loss. Therefore, the performance test of websites comes into the picture. To perform the performance testing on any website there are so many tools available, for example, JMeter, LoadNinja, WebLOAD and so on.”

JMeter Overview:

Apache JMeter is a popular open-source testing software. It is a Java platform software which is designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. Initially, JMeter was introduced for load and performance test web applications.We can use JMeter to analyze and measure the performance of web application or a variety of services.

The latest version of Apache JMeter is 5.2.1

“ It is one of the most widely used performance testing tools is used by the organization.”

Why JMeter ?

There are “n” number of tools available in the market to perform performance testing on websites, But the question is raised why “JMeter”.

Suppose there is a situation occurs when your manager asks you to do performance testing of www.amazon.com for 10000 users. What would you do?

It is not feasible at all to arrange 10000 people with PC and also with internet access simultaneously accessing amazon.com, Now Think about the infrastructure requirement when you test for 10000 users. Hence, at that point in time, you need a powerful performance testing software tool like Apache JMeter that will simulate real-user behaviors and performance/load test your site.

Advantages of JMeter :

(1) User Friendly : it is very Simple, user friendly and easy to learn as compared to other performance testing tools.

(2) Open Source : It is an totally open-source product with zero licensing cost.

(3) Record & Playback : It provides record and playback options along with drag and drop feature which makes it easier and faster to create scripts.

(4) Easy Installation : It’s Installation is very easy, Just run JMeter.bat on windows / run Jmeter.sh on Linux

(5) Good Community Support : It has a very good community support. JMeter has many online tutorials and blogs.

(6) Platform Independent : JMeter is 100 % pure written in java. Therefore, it is platform-independent and also supports all the features of java.

(7) Programming : It does not require extreme programming language knowledge only java language is enough.

Disadvantages of JMeter :

(Limitations of Apche JMeter)

(1) Apache JMeter is a good tool for testing web application but it is not a suitable tool for testing desktop-like applications.

(2) It does not have a network visualization feature unlike other performance testing tools like LoadRunner.

(3)JMeter can simulate heavy load and visualize the test report. The ultimate result is that it consumes lots of memory and can lead out of memory under a very heavy load.

How JMeter Works:

Figure Demonstrates the Flow of JMeter:

(How JMeter Works)

It simulates a group of users sending requests to a target server, and return statistics information of target server through graphical diagrams (Listeners).