Using Apache JMeter For Load Testing

Load testing is something that you really need a decent solution for. A simple tool such as Apache Bench (ab) is overly simplistic for todays web applications.

After some research I decided to use Apache Jmeter as the tool of choice. It is written in Java so easy enough to run on any platform. It features a GUI which is ideal for creating your tests, then a command line version which is what you should use to run your tests.

For my purposes I wanted to feed in a large list of URLs, for that I followed these instructions: http://asciiville.com/musings/coder/how-to-feed-jmeter-from-csv

This allows you to create a csv file with your choice of URLs. It was actually quite hard to find a decent and succint guide to getting this set up but thankfully that page fitted my requirements.

Once I started to run the test I quickly realised that my system was grinding to a halt with out of memory errors. A bit more searching yielded this page which advises on how to properly run Jmeter including the fact that you really should run it on the command line for proper testing. http://blazemeter.com/blog/jmeter-performance-and-tuning-tips


Tags: loadlinuxoptimisationserverperformancetesting