Skip to content

Load Testing Blog

JMeter vs Gatling Tool

I think you'll agree when I say:

It's REALLY hard to decide whenever JMeter or Gatling Tool should be used.

You're probably wondering:

  • How does JMeter to Gatling Tool compare?
  • Which tool has best documentation? Performances? Script Maintainability?
  • Should I use JMeter or Gatling? Or maybe both?

Well, it turns out you can gain significant insight on JMeter and Gatling differences in just 5 minutes reading!

Following up our article about why we chose JMeter to build OctoPerf, our Cloud Load Testing Platform, this post compares JMeter and Gatling Tool on many different fields:

  • Project History: which tools is improved and maintained more actively,
  • Features: which of the two has the most features,
  • Setup: how each tool can be installed,
  • Documentation: which tool does have the most complete documentation,
  • Scripting: compares how to design scripts with both tool,
  • Performances: is JMeter faster than Gatling? Which is the most efficient tool,
  • and even more!

Ready for some action? Let's go!

Building Better Software

OctoPerf has been built from the ground with one unique idea: writing code that's pleasant to work with. Code quality is our number one priority. When you create your own startup, you quickly understand that the number one enemy are not your competitors: it is yourself!

When creating a startup you realize that your product:

  • must be released as quickly as possible on the market,
  • needs as many features as possible to catch back the competitors,
  • must be bug free to give your users the best possible experience.

Performance comes with a trade-off

Everyone knows that having a website which is fast is better than slow. But, did you know that improving the speed of your web application almost always comes with a trade-off?

Like Antoine Lavoisier said Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. What happens when altering a web or mobile app to improve its performances?

How fast do you want to be?

First of all, you should ask yourself this question. Try to target a reasonable goal, and stick to it. Maybe is your web or mobile app already fast enough? Load testing your app gives you how fast your application behaves under a given load. Is the app within the reasonable target response time?

Hosting Jekyll on Amazon Web Services

Our need is to create a fast website, in as less time as possible. Time is money, and when you launch a Startup, it is a very scarce resource.

Our prerequisites:

  • Best possible response times from anywhere in our geographical market (Worldwide: USA, Europe and India).
  • An already designed website template, we are not CSS gurus, and building it from scratch takes too much time.
  • Easy to customize, it must match our graphic design with just a few modifications.
  • Maintainable, we must be able to add content quickly.
  • Can be deployed using Jenkins, our continuous integration tool.

That is why we choose to use Jekyll to create a static website deployed on Amazon Web Services (S3 and CloudFront).

Page Response time Perception

The visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results depends on its loading speed. Since 2010, Google announced that Webmasters should optimize their web pages loading speed because it's going to be a ranking criteria: Page speed and Search Engine Ranking. Matt Cutts predicted this change on his blog.

Moreover, global website performance is also important for your visitors. Most people dislike when a website is stuck loading the page, and leave without coming back. With internet being faster and faster, people become more impatient and refuse to wait.

With increasing network speed, both on mobile and desktop, users are used to quick page loading. This would have been a completely different story when users were connecting using 56k. Did you know that most people leave a website after 2 seconds of waiting?