Web application testing with JMeter

http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

Jmeter is a useful tool for testing applications, I have mainly used it for web application testing, it can be used for other types software too. The target application does not have to be a Java application.

When developing web applications its essential to load test the application early and often. Using JMeter it is easy to have a working load test script ready all the time while working on the application.

Creating a simple web application test is easy with JMeter, just add a thread group, add some http requests to the group and go. This is the bare minimum test script.

To actually get some meaningful results you need to add some type of listener, for example graph listener which shows graphically the number of requests served by the web application. The numbers it shows include throughput and the average response time, this is very useful to get a quick look at the application performance.

For testing more complicated web applications you need to create some regular expressions for parsing the resulting response pages. This might sound complicated but it is really easy, I will write about this in another post.