Performance Testing using Apache JMeter — Part 2

Jawadhasan
6 min readAug 25, 2021

Introduction

In previous post about performance testing, we learned the basics of performance testing and JMeter tool. We learned that “ performance testing tests how an application or resource performs under a given load “.

We also learned about performance matrices (we can measure performance in terms of):

  • Response time
  • Throughput (nos of requests kb/sec)
  • Reliability (percentage of errors)
  • Scalability (how previous matrices vary when changing the hardware or software configs of application)

We learned that we can generate load in terms of:

Depending on how we apply the load there are different types of tests:

  • Load Test (validates the performance with specific load).
  • Stress Test (to know the performance limits of app).
  • Spike Test (to monitor the app behavior during change of load).
  • Endurance Test (to detect memory or connection leaks of app)

We also had a brief introduction of JMeter which is a multi-threaded, multi-protocol client that can execute complex test scenarios for performance testing. We also learned in previous post, how to install JMeter on windows machine.

Today we will put those learning in practice and write our first simple performance test for a REST API.

Getting Started with JMeter

When we first start the JMeter tool, we’ll be presented with a screen which looks like the following:

There are different terminologies and options which we can use in JMeter. We’ll focus on the basic items in this post which shall allow us to get started quickly.

Test Plan

This is the root element of a test, where its overall settings are specified and all other elements are controlled.

A Test Plan can be viewed as a container for running tests.

Some elements of a proper test plans are :

In a test plan, it is a must to have at least one thread group.

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Jawadhasan

Software Solutions Team Lead | Cloud Architect | Solutions Architect