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Load Testing Blog

  • in JMeter
  • 14 min read

A complete look at JMeter's FTP and SSH SFTP samplers

While the File Transfer Protocol is one of the original protocols used in the early adoption of the internet it remains a fundamental part of modern computer networks.

In this post we will look at the way the JMeter can support you in performance testing FTP and SFTP.

SFTP is a more recent development to provide a layer of security over the original protocol to make it more suitable for the modern internet and is different to FPT in many ways.

Whilst SFTP is considered more appropriate for modern systems there are still many applications that rely on, and implement, FTP and therefore we will look at how we can test both.

If you want to follow along, a JMX file containing all the steps detailed below can be downloaded here.

Risk Assessment In Performance Testing

Performance Testing coverage needs to be defined from the application under tests functional requirements and this does not change regardless of whether you are following an Agile or a more Planned approach.

The Risk Assessment process defines what performance testing needs to be executed and the order in which this should be approached, the reason we use the functional test requirements for definition of coverage as these functional requirements define what the system does whereas the non-functional requirements are what you use to measure your tests against when you execute them.

As discussed the Risk Assessment is a way of identifying where your performance testing effort should be focussed and prioritising the order in which your performance tests are written and therefore executed so you ensure that you are focussing on the riskiest, from a performance perspective, aspects of the system first; we will expand on what we mean by riskiest later in this post.

A Risks Assessment should be done as early in the project or sprint, if you are working in an Agile methodology, as is possible to maximise its benefits.

The first thing we will discuss is the differences between Agile and Non-Agile Risk Assessment as this is an important concept but only as far as what is assessed and when, the principles of how and why we carry out a risk assessment will become clear as you read this post and remain the same regardless of your approach to development.

Troubleshoot your tests

Preparing resilient tests can be a challenging process when you do not know where to start. We will cover this in this guide, from the virtual user validation to smoke testing. And then analyzing the most common errors and how to fix them. Note that we also recommend reading this other guide, it can greatly help understand the analysis and report engine of OctoPerf.

As a final note before we start, as much as you might want to jump to the relevant section of this guide, I strongly recommend you take a few minutes to read the next section since proper test preparation is essential to a strong error analysis later.

  • in JMeter
  • 12 min read

Looking at the uses of JMeter Timers

Timers in JMeter are incredibly important when it comes to the balance and pace of your performance tests, we are going to look at the Timers that ship with the standard JMeter installation in this Blog post but there are others that are available as a Plugin and hopefully this post will encourage you to investigate these further.

The timers that we will discuss are:

The basics of Simple Performance Testing

You don’t have to performance test if you are not bothered about the performance of your application; this is the only reason, if you are bothered and you want to make sure your customers get the best possible experience then it is wise to do some.

You have probably experienced poor application performance if you do any form of online shopping, many web sites are unable to handle the volumes of load and concurrency they see on their eCommerce platforms at peak times sure as Black Friday or Christmas.

Some even have to introduce a queuing system to throttle the load on their systems which leads to customer complaints and a poor reputation.

In this Blog Post we are going to look at some of the things you can do, that are not overly complicated, to reduce the risk of poor performance on your applications; basically, the simplest approach to performance testing we can think of.

Clearly, we would always recommend you invest a fair proportion of your QA effort to performance testing but if that is not something you wish to do then these simple things could be the difference between an application that can cope with high seasonal demands and one that does not.

This is therefore our guide to a simple performance test.