In the last few decades, we're seeing intense growth in the Software Testing industry. It's also important for us to ensure the performance of a software application is required to ensure that the application runs without any failures.
This article will provide in-depth knowledge about the Apache JMeter performance testing tool for analyzing and measuring in the following sequence:
- What is Performance Testing?
- What is JMeter and how does it work?
- Advantages of JMeter
What is Performance Testing?
Performance testing is a practice to determine how a system performs in terms of responsiveness, stability under a particular workload. It may be from different geo-locations and for different user scenarios.
A few years ago, Flipkart, India’s largest E-Commerce company, encountered issues on its Big Billion Day sale progressed. The payment gateway was down and consumers could not finalize their purchases. Also, in its attempt to limit access only via the mobile application, Flipkart’s sale began with application crashes due to unknown reasons. On the day of the Big Billion Day sale, Flipkart’s customers could not properly access the website due to slow server access.
Poor performance, whether website crashes or slow page loading, equals an immediate and long-term loss of revenue and needs immediate churn.
Any website, big or small, have downtime, and there are disruptions, however negligible. Be it payment gateway downtime, app crashes or server issues, the fact of the matter is, when the load gets heavy or the traffic is pouring in, website applications and mobile applications tend to face severe performance issues.
Performance Testing also serves to investigate, measure, validate different attributes of a system such as -
Speed: The system is tested and evaluated to check the speed with which it responds -Scalability: Checks the variation in response time/scalability as the load on the system varies.
Reliability: Validates whether the app is reliable under prolonged periods of high user traffic.
Stability: Evaluates if the system is stable under heavy concurrent user load.
What is JMeter and how does it work?
Apache JMeter™ is a pure Java-based, Open source software application used to load test functional behaviour and measure performance.
It's a non-functional testing tool used to simulate a heavy load on a Server or Group of Servers in a network to test the strength or to analyse and measure the performance of different software services and products under different load types.
Advantages of JMeter
- Open Source - As its an open-source software. We can download free of cost.
- User-Friendly - It's GUI helps to create a Test Plan easily and configuring respective elements. Just need to right-click on the scenario and add them.
Recording - It also allows user to record HTTP/HTTPS to create a Test plan using Recording. Uses Proxy Server that allows JMeter to watch and record actions while browsing web application with a normal browser.
Reporting - Supports different kinds of dashboard report generation. A host of reports are generated through JMeter which helps the user to understand Performance test execution results.
Support other non-functional tests - It is not only designed to perform Performance Testing but also supports other non-functional tests such as Stress Testing, Distributed Testing, Web service testing, etc.
JMeter Installation Process
As Apache JMeter™ is a pure Java-based application, it requires the latest JVM. To know if your system holds the latest version of Java you can just type the below command in the command prompt.
Java -version
The latest version can be downloaded here. Once done, you can simply unzip the zip/tar file into the respective directory you want JMeter to be installed. Here, we don't have any installation screen to deal with.
Once downloaded, you can just navigate to the below path to start JMeter in Graphical User Interface.
/bin/jmeter.bat for Windows machine
/bin/jmeter.shell for Mac or Linux machine
You must be able to view the below screen once launched.
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