Performance Testing using Apache JMeter

Introduction

How our application is performing is a very core question in software development. In this post we will have a basic overview of performance testing, its various types and introduction of JMeter which is one of the most popular performance testing tool in industry. We will be using it to do performance testing of a web application.

Let’s learn a little bit about performance testing next:

Performance Testing

Performance is usually related to “ how fast an application executes an operation “.

Performance testing is not only about measuring speed only. In particular performance is measured in terms of:

• Response Time (response time + processing time + network latency)
• Throughput (Nos. of transactions i.e. request/response per unit of time (e.g. million/sec).
• Reliability (i.e. no of errors / no. of requests)
• Scalability (i.e. response time + throughput + percentage of error)

Performance Requirement Examples

Few examples as follows:

• The average/max response time should be 800 ms.
• The system shall be able to support 60 pages/second.
• The system shall be capable of supporting 1000 users per hour.

Performance Testing Process