Performance

[Aditi]

Hello Sir,

I have been following your blogs and would like to thank you for the
wonderful insight on various topics and providing pointers to various
knowledge material.

Recently i have been working on a performance monitoring tool for my
company and would like to get ideas from group members on it.

The idea is to build a tool which fires n number of request on the web
application and measures the response time. Its a simple java tool
which takes request script and datapool files and executes it.
The tool is automated and run on daily builds so that we can monitor
performance on daily builds.
My questions are:
1. Is there any open source tool which can be used? I saw JMeter but
could not clearly figure out how to go about it.
I would like to build some reporting mechanism so that the results
make sense.
2. Any material or insight on performance monitoring tools/ load
testing would be useful.

Thanks,
Aditi

[Kalpak Gadre]

I think JMeter would be the right fit for what you are doing. For
reporting, check out the JMeter wiki page

http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta-jmeter/LogAnalysis

It would need some effort to understand this tool, but would always be
faster than developing something of your own.

What do you mean by request scripts and the datapool files?

[Aditi]

Hi Kalpak,

Thanks for your response.

Request scripts are xml file which holds the common parameters and url
which are part of the HTTP request. Datapool are the external input
required by system like username, password which are dependent on
users.

Will check out JMeter. Even I am not self convinced to develop a
proprietary tool as it would get tedious to build and maintain it for
a huge application like ours.

Thanks,
Aditi

[Kalpak Gadre]

I hope that JMeter can do things like sending custom request parameters (both post / get) etc. in JMeter. I have personally never used JMeter :) but I think its very mature (been there for long time)

In case you are doing something custom (I would recommend not to) you can check out HttpClient library by apache. This library has basic HTTP communication  library. I wont be surprised if JMeter itself was built on top of that.

[Parag Shah]

I agree with Kalpak. Unfortunately, I too have not used JMeter, but I do believe it should be able to handle request and data scripts as you mention.

Even if it does not do things in quite the way you want it to, remember it is open source. Besides changing the source to adapt it to your need, you may also be able to plugin to it's factories and make it use your classes to do some of the stuff.

Most well designed software use factories and I am sure JMeter does so for loading classes that do the sending of requests. So you may be able to create your own implementations of certain classes and configure JMeter to use them instead of it's standard classes. I think your effort might be better spent in adding your specific customizations to JMeter, than in building something from the ground up.

Again, I have to say that I have not used JMeter, but I am almost sure that it will suit your needs.

--
Thanks & Regards
Parag Shah