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.
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.
Regression Testing, as all Quality Assurance professionals know, is ensuring that previously developed and tested software continues to operate after a change.
Performance Regression being a subset of regression testing as a discipline is therefore ensuring that previously developed and tested continues to meet its performance criteria after a change.
There are subtle differences in the way that performance regression testing is approached when compared with functional regression testing, and we will look to explore these in this Blog Post.
A suitable performance regression strategy can provide huge benefits to your organisation, and we will look that these benefits as well as how to accomplish them.
Once you have a performance regression test suite it is important that it constantly evolves and is not left to become outdated and eventually obsolete, it must be maintained as we will discuss this also, but the benefits of a well-maintained regression pack will exceed the effort required to maintain them.
This post is about Kafka and the process I have been through recently writing a performance test for an application that subscribes to messages from this technology.
The test I ended up with was in the end very straightforward but there were several hurdles that took a while to resolve. I hope that reading this post will hopefully help you avoid them.
The performance testing concepts we will discuss are focused on how to publish messages onto a Kafka topic and will not discuss how to write a test to consume messages from Kafka. We wanted to focus first on some of the concepts of adding messages and we will look at the consumption in a later post.
If you are performance testing an application that subscribes to a Kafka topic then the consumption of messages will be performed by the application you are testing, and therefore you will not need a consumer test.
You will mostly be performance testing an application that consumes from Kafka and would probably only want a consumer if you were testing your implementation of Kafka.
Before we start let’s take a high level look at what Kafka is and how it works.