JMeter as a Performance testing tool

One of the free and opensource web performance testing tools that we use in the industry is JMeter. It has been the only choice when we think about the ridiculous prices of some proprietary load test tools that are available in the market

Anyway we have been facing some issues working with JMeter earlier, mainly

• Record/ Capture scripts
• Lack of reporting/analysis capabilities

JMeter was not as good as a commercial tool when it comes to recording scripts. Its quite tiresome to setup to recording mode(using proxies) and if you try to do it manually, Its a nightmare.

Also Listeners that are shipped with JMeter as not as friendly as those that of commercial tools and gives less opportunity to dig down in to real performance parameters.

I was recently amazed to see that those gaps have been filled to a great extent due to the introduction of some 3rd party components that can be used along with Jmeter latest release version. Thanks for the generosity of the Internet community

Badboy 2.1.11(http://www.badboy.com.au/)- This is a free web record and playback functinal and load testing tool that can be used to generate necessary .jmx scripts that can be used in JMeter. It has the option to export the badboy script to .jmx script.

There is an compatibility issue if you use JMeter 2.5 where if you export a .jmx file from Badboy 2.1.11 and opening in JMeter 2.5 you get an error. A workaround for that is you might need to use a lower version of JMeter(2.3.4) , import the .jmx script which was exported by Badboy and save it as a test plan and reopen it with JMeter 2.5.

Listeners/reporting has been reinforced with the introduction of some plugins to JMeter. You can download this plugin from http://code.google.com/p/jmeter-plugins/.

Just download this .zip file and extract it. Then copy JMeterPlugins.jar file to jakarta-jmeter-2.5\lib\ext. Make sure you have Java JDK 1.6 or above is installed.  It has some nice performance parameters introduced like

• Perfmon matrix collection(SUT)
• Hits per second
• Response times Vs Threads

You can get the whole bunch of the new additions by visiting their site

Thanks again for all contributors!

Some of the graphs and Tread models of this new plug-in are shown below