Lesson 23 - PHP Testing - Practicing Apache JMeter

In the previous lesson, PHP Testing - Performance testing using cloud services, we dived into performance testing web applications in PHP. We explained different test types and tried the Load test using a cloud service. In today's final tutorial, we're going to show the basics of using JMeter and test our web application on localhost.

Apache JMeter

JMeter is completely free of charge and we can download it at http://jmeter.apache.org/. From the home page menu, select "Releases", then select "mirror", open the JMeter folder, then "binaries" and download the latest version as zip. Unzip the folder somewhere, for example, to your desktop.

I run my calculator directly on the localhost domain, so I'm going to enter this domain. You use localhost/calculator or calculator.localhost, depends where you calculator is running at.

As I develop in a virtual machine, I'll typically have a lower performance than you on real hardware. I've already crossed the line when my development environment can be configured within a few hours so I learned to save it and just run a Virtual Box with a vhd ready on a different systems. If the hardware resources are allocated properly, lots of hours are saved in configuration. But let's get back to the testing.

In the "bin" folder, run the JMeter.jar file. Of course, you must have Java installed (JRE - http://www.oracle.com/…2133155.html). Because the look of Java isn't its strong aspect, I recommend switching to "Look and Feel" in the "Options" menu and choosing "System" after starting the application. This will adopt the application appearance from your operating system.

Creating a test

Test plan

When we run the app, a new test plan is already in place. You can rename it, I named it CalculatorPlan.

You can also define global variables in this tab.