Apache JMeter: A practical beginner's guide to automated testing and performance measurement for your websites

A bad response time on a website can drive away visitors and prospective customers. To measure what a website can handle, there should be a way to simulate and analyze different load scenarios–this is where a load-testing tool like JMeter comes in. JMeter is a powerful desktop performance tool from the Apache Jakarta project, written in Java, for load-testing web pages, web applications, and other static and dynamic resources including databases, files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, FTP Servers, and more.

JMeter works by acting as the "client side" of an application, and measures response time. As such, it's one half of the testing arsenal; the other half consists of a tool to watch metrics on the server side, such as thread counts, CPU loads, resource usage, and memory usage. Although it can't behave like a browser to measure rich client-side logic such as JavaScripts or Applets, JMeter certainly measures the performance of the target server from the client's point of view. JMeter is able to capture test results that help you make informed decisions and benchmark your application.

This book introduces you to JMeter (version 2.3) and test automation, providing a step-by-step guide to testing with JMeter. You will learn how to measure the performance of a website using JMeter.

While it discusses test automation generally, the bulk of this book gives specific, vivid, and easy-to-understand walkthroughs of JMeter's testing tools showing what they can do, and when and how to use them.

What you will learn from this book?

* Why automating tests is so useful, and how it will help you to improve performance of your web sites and applications
* Installing, setting up the environment, and running JMeter
* Planning automated tests to provide a thorough insight into application performance, bottle necks, and load bearing capabilities
* Building a test plan to test your websites
* Test web, database, FTP servers and more - so you can get a detailed insight into which parts of your application are holding up performance
* Build more complex test elements using regular expressions and functions
* Capture, process, and analyse test results

Approach

This book is focussed on learning and understanding JMeter. It starts with a basic introduction and installation, followed by using JMeter to test web applications. It proceeds to show how to use JMeter to perform load testing and also to test the functional behavior of the target web application. The discussion continues to include testing servers other than web application servers, and demonstrates the use of some of JMeter's built-in functions. This book aims to give readers an introductory view of JMeter, and gives a brief and realistic overview to those researching for an ideal testing tool to use in testing projects.

The book is written in a straightforward, clear way, with plenty of step-by-step instructions and illustrative screenshots.

Who this book is written for?

The ideal readers or users of this book are experienced or novice testers who have been testing manually and now would like to automate their tests. Those testers who are already automating their testing using other tools or testing software may also want to use this book as they look for alternatives. This book would also be a good point for test Managers/Leaders to start doing research on the test automation tool that may best suit their testing needs and of course, their budget

JMeter's target audience is the testing community, which is generally not the hangout of developers or technical people. Almost anything one would like to do in HTTP testing will be supported by JMeter without requiring any programming.

The user need not have much technical knowledge to work with JMeter. It has a simple-to-use and intuitive drag-and-drop style GUI that helps any non-technical user to get started.


About the Author
Since graduating in 1998, from California State University in Computer Science, Emily H. Halili has taken numerous roles in the IT/Software industry—namely as Software Engineer, Network Engineer, Lecturer, and Trainer. Currently a QA Engineer in CEO Consultancy-Malaysia with great passion for testing, she has two years of experience in software testing and managing QA activities. She is an experienced manual tester and has practical knowledge of various open-source automation tools and framework, including JMeter, Selenium, JProfiler, Badboy, Sahi, Watij and many more.