All the tools that can help a website or intranet application developer to ensure it won't crash under load.

What is Apache JMeter?

JMeter is an Apache Jakarta project that can be used as a load testing tool for analyzing and measuring the performance of a variety of services, with a focus on web applications.

Apache JMeter may be used to test performance under stress both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more). It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types. You can use it to make a graphical analysis of performance or to test your server/script/object behavior under heavy concurrent load.

JMeter is not a browser. As far as web-services and remote services are concerned, JMeter looks like a browser (or rather, multiple browsers); however JMeter does not perform all the actions supported by browsers. In particular, JMeter does not execute the Javascript found in HTML pages. Nor does it render the HTML pages as a browser does (it's possible to view the response as HTML etc, but the timings are not included in any samples, and only one sample in one thread is ever viewed at a time).

How it works?

To use JMeter to test e.g. a SOAP interface layer, all you basically need is the URL and SOAP request. Starting with that you can build your test plan. Using variables, counters, parameters, CSV files, loops, logs, etc.

JMeter is a bit light on user feedback from test actions performed in the graphical interface. When starting a test, the only feedback that there's something happening is the thread count which is displayed in the top right hand corner (and maybe the sound of a creaking application somewhere).

Features

Apache JMeter features include:

• Can load and performance test HTTP and FTP servers as well as arbitrary database queries (via JDBC).
• Complete 100% Java purity.
• Caching and off-line analysis/replaying of test results.
• Extensible:
  • Several load statistics may be chosen with pluggable timers.
  • Data analysis and visualization plugins allow some personalization.
  • Functions can be used to provide dynamic input to a test or provide data manipulation.
  • Scriptable Samplers (BeanShell is supported; and there is a sampler which supports BSF-compatible languages).