Apache JMeter is a popular application that is used for testing the performance of web servers. Besides load testing web servers, the open source project grew to support testing other network protocols, such as LDAP, FTP, and even raw TCP packets. It is highly configurable, and powerful enough to design complex workloads of different usage patterns. This feature can be used to simulate thousands of users suddenly visiting our web application, thereby inducing a spike in the load.
Another feature expected in any load-testing software is its data capture and analysis functions. JMeter has such a wide variety of data recording, plotting, and analysis features that we can explore the results of our benchmarks right away. Finally, it has a wide variety of plugins that may already have the load pattern, analysis, or network connection that we plan to use.
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