Introduction
In this tutorial, we will go over how to use Apache JMeter to perform basic load and stress testing on your web application environment. We will show you how to use the graphical user interface to build a test plan and to run tests against a web server.
JMeter is an open source desktop Java application that is designed to load test and measure performance. It can be used to simulate loads of various scenarios and output performance data in several ways, including CSV and XML files, and graphs. Because it is 100% Java, it is available on every OS that supports Java 6 or later.
Prerequisites
In order to follow this tutorial, you will need to have a computer that you can run JMeter on, and a web server to load test against. Do not run these tests against your production servers unless you know they can handle the load, or you may negatively impact your server’s performance.
You may adapt the tests in this tutorial to any of your own web applications. The web server that we are testing against as an example is a 1 CPU / 512 MB VPS running WordPress on a LEMP Stack, in the NYC2 DigitalOcean Datacenter. The JMeter computer is running in the DigitalOcean office in NYC (which is related to the latency of our tests).
Please note that the JMeter test results can be skewed by a variety of factors, including the system resources (CPU and RAM) available to JMeter and the network between JMeter and the web server being tested. The size of the load that JMeter can generate without skewing the results can be increased by running the tests in the non-graphical mode or by distributing the load generation to multiple JMeter servers. Lire la suite…