Performance testing is an essential part of the development of, for instance, large public websites.
Performance testing presents similar challenges as integration testing. We need a testing system that is similar to a production system in order for the performance test data to be useful to make a forecast about real production system performance.
The most commonly used performance test is load testing. With load testing, we measure, among other things, the response time of a server while the performance testing software generates synthetic requests for the server.
Apache JMeter is an example of an open source application for measuring performance. While it's simpler than its proprietary counterparts, such as LoadRunner, JMeter is quite useful, and simplicity is not really a bad thing.
JMeter can generate simulated load and measure response times for a...
