What is Jmeter ?

What is Performance Testing:

Performance Testing is defined as a type of software testing to ensure that software applications will perform well under their expected workload. It focuses on certain factors of a Software Program such as:

• Speed – It Checks whether the response of the application is fast.
• Scalability – It determines the maximum user load.
• Stability – It checks if the application is stable under varying loads.

It is very important to verify whether the product meets expected or required performance. Unfortunately, we figure out this pitfall post-delivery of the product. But performance has become an inevitable factor nowadays, especially for web and mobile applications as the user strength is very huge for each application.

Tools used for Performance Testing:

Performance testing is significant in real-time, particularly from a point of view of customer satisfaction. There are several performance testing tools available such as:

• Apache JMeter
• LoadRunner
• WebLOAD
• LoadUI
• LoadView
• NeoLoad

How does JMeter perform Testing?

Let’s have a look at the different steps performed by JMeter during testing:

• It creates a request and sends it to the server.
• It receives the response from the server, collects them and visualizes those details in a chart or graph.
• It processes the response from the server.
• It generates the test result in several formats such as text, XML, JSON so that the tester can analyze data.

Apache JMeter – How it works?

The web server handles or carries loads of lots of applications & its user, so there is a need to know how JMeter helps us to handle the performance of Web server to manage simultaneous users or their applications. 

For Example:Online purchasing site, how they handle their sale when there are lots of users are accessing the same page of the product. To handle or check that kind of performance of application or server we must do a high performance or load testing using JMeter.

There are three different approaches to JMeter testing:

• Performance Testing - This testing used to test the performance of site configuration of infrastructure & helps us to get results Quickly & easily before we transfer the application in a production environment.
• Load Testing - This testing is used to check the extreme load of a system that can be aimed to handle.
• Stress Test - This test tries to break the system by crushing its resources.

Plugins & Protocols:

JMeter works with different plugins & Protocols, Also Off-site developers can simply spread JMeter with custom plugins.

 JMeter works on many protocols which are: 

• Web Services - SOAP / XML-RPC
• Service - POP3, IMAP, SMTP, FTP
• Web - HTTPS sites ‘web 1.0’ web 2.0 (ajax, flex and flex-ws-amf), HTTP 
• Messaging Oriented service - JMS
• Database - JDBC drivers, Directory – LDAP

Working features of JMeter:

JMeter works as a number of users send a request for accessing some server & shows the performance by the listeners like tables, graphs etc. 

Characteristics of Apache JMeter

Why People choose Apache JMeter for Performance & Load testing. Here are some characteristics which are mentioned below:

• Open-source application - Apache JMeter is an openly available free tool & it facilitates users or developers to use the code for other development or modification purpose.
• Platform independent - It can run on any platform & also it is capable enough to check the load & performance of any server requests.
• User-friendly GUI - Its user-friendly, simple & easy to understand.
• Write your own test - Using Jmeter we can write our own test cases. It uses a text editor to create a test plan and supplies in XML format.

• Simulation - JMeter can parallelly work with threads to generate a heavy load on the server.
• Installation - It's easy to install on different OS like:
  Run the “*.bat” file to use JMeter
  Mac - JMeter can be accessed by typing the Mr. JMeter.sh
  Linux/Unix – JMeter can be accessed by clicking on a JMeter shell script.
  Windows – JMeter can be accessed by starting the JMeter.bat file.
• Record & Run: JMeter provides the facility to record the steps by using the Blaze master add-on & run with any number of threads & listeners.
• Support multi-protocol: JMeter works on web application testing and database server testing and supports protocols such as JDBC, HTTP, LDAP, SOAP, JMS, and FTP.

JMeter is a pure Java application and should run correctly on any system that has a compatible Java implementation.

Here is the list of an operating system compatible with JMeter:

• Linux
• Windows
• Mac OS
• Ubuntu

JMeter GUI: Test Plan & Workbench

As soon as you launch JMeter, you will see 2 elements

• Test Plan
• Workbench

What is a Test Plan?Test Plan is where you add elements required for your JMeter Test.

It stores all the elements (like ThreadGroup, Timers etc.) and their corresponding settings required to run your desired Tests.

What is WorkBench?The WorkBench simply provides a place to store test elements temporarily. WorkBench has no relation with Test Plan. JMeter will not save the contents of the WorkBench. It only saves the contents of the Test Plan branch.

Hope this blog helps to make you clearer about the Apache JMeter. Feel free to share your queries OR any feedback for the same.