September 2012 Topic - Don't Stress Out! Use JMeter to Predict Web App Performance

9 views

Skip to first unread message

Jack Frosch

unread,

Sep 4, 2012, 12:43:23 PM9/4/12

to gatew...@googlegroups.com

After a long Labor Day weekend, it's time to dive into some testing.

We've all been there. Everything works fine in our web app in development. Everything works fine in the hands of the testers. Then our customers get the app and the feedback pours in - Why is the app so slow when we access page X? So we test page X and it's snappy as always. Our testers test page X and it works fine.

Perplexed, we go down various rabbit holes looking for the cause, but can never zero in on the exact cause. Is it because of the customer's data set? Unique security or proxy settings?

Then we bring together a bunch of developers, testers, BAs, managers, the janitor, whomever to try to recreate the customer load, whether that be 20 users doing 10 form submissions, or 200 users doing 1 form submission and bam! The app starts to flake out.

How can we predict the effect or load and concurrency without the overhead and aggravation of using live users manually banging away to recreate the customer load? A simple answer is to use Apache JMeter!

In this talk, we'll take a look at using JMeter to test our apps' performance under load. While JMeter can test a lot of types of apps, like web services, JMS, LDAP, mail, etc., we'll focus on its ability to test web apps.

In this talk, we'll cover:

A brief overview of JMeter
How to install it and start using it (So easy, you won't believe it!)
Examine core concepts, including Thread Groups, HTTP Request Defaults, Controllers, Listeners and More
Building a web test plan
Recording tests

We'll have plenty of demos, including running tests against a live demo app locally as well as a couple of public sites.

So come on out and see how easy it is to use JMeter to avoid unpleasant surprises about how poor your web app performance is! Be sure to RSVP so we can plan enough food and drink.

(Plan on staying for the Gateway Groovy User Group to learn more about web testing! This month's topic: Web Application Testing with Geb.)