Apache JMeter vs. IBM DevOps Test Performance

The key questions I would pose are: how high of a concurrent load do you need to generate against the system? How technically skilled are your personnel that will perform the load testing? How much programmable/scripting/code based control do you desire from the tool? Do you prefer more of a GUI based tool or a programmatic code/scripting based tool? JMeter will be for those that want a GUI, moderate to low scripting/code based control/programmability, moderate to low load generation, and for users experienced in the novice to expert range.

Go for IBM RPT if: 1. You're testing a Java-based Web application with HTTP protocol 2. You wanted to distribute the load across machines easily 3. Your team is in learning phase/not really introduced to a wide range of performance testing tools Do not go for IBM RPT if: 1. You wanted to test REST or any other advanced protocols 2. Your system under test demands a very high user load 3. Your application is written in .NET or any other platform except Java.

Incentivized

• Easy to construct Webservices script - You just need to add a sampler with the endpoint, payload and header information. And boom you can run a load test on the service with varying load and capture the response time and throughput. In a commercial tool like Loadrunner or Silkperformer, this process would take at least couple of hours, while with Jmeter we can do this in 10 minutes or less.
• Modularizing the scripts - Jmeter has a very good way of organizing the scripts and the reusability of the existing script (transactions) is also as easy as copy pasting the script.
• Jmeter tests can be run from anywhere, so you can run it from the idle webserver itself if you have some firewall restrictions to test it from your local or other environment.
• Jmeter distributed tests can be spawn from the AWS and results collated to see the performance from different regions in the world.

• Data Parameterisation/ Data Correlation is made simpler compared to its competitors
• Distributed Load Testing is easier to set up
• Performance metric gathering while a test is in progress
• Th look and Feel really helps a beginner to understand and work with.

Incentivized

• Even though it has very easy installation, you can run into issues easily. I was ab;e to trigger a test at browser level but couldn't stop the tests. I had to kill it from task manager and then had to reinstall from begining.
• There are so many things in JMeter you can do especially with the sampler for selenium for UI tests. More documentation/webinars etc.. would help the community better.
• The jmx files should have an easy way to be integrated with ci/cd tools and cloud.

Incentivized

• Memory utilization could have been improved.(Eats up system's RAM)! It may crash if a test is conducted with the heavy load if adequate RAM is not available in the VM/host machine.
• Licensing could have been made simpler. IBM's licensing method is difficult to follow.
• Support for protocols other than HTTP. Not really up to the current trend.

Incentivized

Price, Wiki and user sharing. Having access to the information provided by the developers and other open source providers is key for me. The ability to share information and get answers directly is very important to success in software testing. And the price of this product currently is amazing. Too many companies charge way too much money for products that are far behind in their value and pertinence

I can jump right into a new test plan and start building from scratch. The natural progression from test plan to thread group and then designing the basic format of the process is very streamlined and smooth. With only slight modifications I can build out a very complex model from a very basic beginning.

I have been using JMeter for the last year. By using this tool, you can make sure the system will work under varied loads. It helps us to simulate real time scenarios by creating required virtual users and make sure the application will work under load. Perform load, stress, and stability testing using JMeter.

Incentivized

I have evaluated LOADUI (web free version) and it was a very unstable tool and I could not rely on those results completely as I was not sure how the tool was performing. It only generated the top 10 less transaction times and when Jmeter was in use, it was very effective in using plugins to accommodate more outputs.

Incentivized

Cost/Licensing: While JMeter is an opensource testing tool from Apache, compared to IBM RPT and HP LoadRunner, RPT is much cheaper than Loadrunner. Functionality: JMeter provides basic functionalities which are adequate for performance testing, however advanced features are not available (such as load testing with GUI, reporting is very basic etc.). But when it comes to Loadrunner, it offers very broad features and supports a variety of protocols. So in this category, Loadrunner is a winner, but RPT is better than JMeter. Ease of operating: JMeter is easy compared to LoadRunner, but it has old GUI and look and feel is not that great to understand. Also, most of the things are to be done in a command line, non-GUI mode. While LoadRunner is very advanced with many options, which also confusing sometimes. But RPT, on the other hand, maintains a balance between simplicity and offering of different features. So winner: RPT.

Incentivized

• It helped to estimate resources required for a particular client requirement. For example if the client wants the application to be used by 500 users for 1 hour, based on the load test we perform for 500 users and 1 hour we recommend resources and their capabilities.
• Jmeter was used to identify bottleneck. This would lead to better performance.
• Jmeter was used to identify failures as well.

• Accuracy in metrics, thus improving system's performance
• Costs less compared to competitor like HP LoadRunner
• Helped the team of beginners learn things quickly

Incentivized