Apache JMeter – An Introduction

JMeter is an open source testing software. It is 100% pure java application for load and performance testing. JMeter is designed to analyse and measure the performance and load functional behaviour of web application and variety of services.

JMeter is mainly used for testing Web application or FTP application but currently, it is applicable in functional testing, JDBC database connections, Web services, generic TCP connections and OS native processes. jMeter is designed to cover categories of tests like load, functional, performance, regression, etc., and it requires JDK 5 or higher.

Stefano Mazzocchi of the Apache Software Foundation was the original developer of JMeter. He wrote it primarily to test the performance of Apache JServ (now called as Apache Tomcat project). Apache later redesigned JMeter to enhance the GUI and to add functional testing capabilities.

JMeter is a Java desktop application with a graphical interface that uses the Swing graphical API. It can therefore run on any environment / workstation that accepts a Java virtual machine, for example – Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.

Following are the list of protocols supported by JMeter:

1. Web – HTTP, HTTPS sites ‘web 1.0’ web 2.0 (ajax, flex and flex-ws-amf).
2. Web Services – SOAP / XML-RPC
3. Database via JDBC drivers
4. Directory – LDAP
5. Messaging Oriented service via JMS
6. Service – POP3, IMAP, SMTP
7. FTP Service

JMeter Features

Following are some important features of JMeter:

1. Open source application: JMeter is an open source software. Therefore, it is freely available.
2. User-friendly GUI: It has a simple and interactive GUI.
3. Support various server types: JMeter can conduct load and performance test for many different server types – Web – HTTP, HTTPS, SOAP, Database via JDBC, LDAP, JMS, Mail – POP3, etc.
4. Platform independent: It is a platform independent tool as it is written and developed using Java.
5. Framework: It is a multi-threading framework which allows concurrent sampling by many threads and simultaneous sampling of different functions by separate thread groups.
6. It is highly extensible.

Working of JMeter:

JMeter simulates a group of users and sends request to a target server. And hence, returns statistics which shows the functionality/ performance of the target server.

Following figure shows how JMeter works: