Wednesday 23 October 2013

Website Scalability Test - JMeter Listeners

Question:


I am on a task to perform a scalability test of a website. I am new to JMeter and I want to know how to capture and analyze the test results using JMeter. More specifically I need to capture the response time of the pages that I would be testing.

By: Saran Sathyan


Answer:

You need to add a listener and configure to write the test results into a Log file. You have the option of using a csv or xml file format. You can do this visually, by right clicking on your test project shown in the left explorer bar and then add-> Listner->... JMeter provides many listeners and you may just choose either Simple Data Writer or View Results in a Table. In the resulting window, you will find options to specify the output file location and configure the data elements that you want to capture. JMeter captures two time fields, one being the elapsed time and the other being latency. While the latency indicates the time to the first response, the elapsed time indicates the total time to load the page completely. With this listener, all your test results will be logged, and you may use simple tools like excel or import into MS Access or such other database as you may be comfortable and then get the necessary summary data by grouping on appropriate fields.


Generally to assess the scalability of your website, you also need to monitor and collect stats from the server(s) on which your website is running at the same time your tests are run. You may have to engage your system administrators to help you in collecting the performance statistics on server resource utilization like, CPU, Memory, Network bandwidth, Disk IO, etc. As you simulate more load from JMeter, the utilization of the resources on the server will go up. The ideal approach is to plan to have multiple tests starting with 50 or 100 users and ramp up the load until you the resource utilization on the server hits the maximum (say 90%). This way you may also benchmark the site performance on the given server hardware and network bandwidth.

Your report should also report the server utilization details in addition to the page response time and the bytes received so as to make it useful for the report users to make further decisions. Also be aware that if you perform the load tests from one location, your test results might be biased as you may hit the bandwidth limitation on your end. Hope this helps.

For more details on JMeter listeners, check out the documentation available online at http://jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/listeners.html

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