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JMeter is old and crusty and not at all friendly to work with. But I used it for years because it was really about the best we had. Today I don't wish it on any

JMeter is old and crusty and not at all friendly to work with. But I used it for years because it was really about the best we had. Today I don't wish it on anyone. Ruby JMeter finally made JMeter easier to manage, but I haven't worked in a Ruby shop for years, and I'm not going to force everyone to learn Ruby just to do some load testing. https://github.com/flood-io/ruby-jmeter https://github.com/flood-io/ruby-jmeter Then along came k6. It's developer-friendly and I've seen people actually enjoy using it. I recommend anyone considering JMeter also take a look at k6. They do a better job of selling it than I do: https://k6.io https://k6.io I am also Gatling-curious. Seems like an option for anyone in the JVM ecosystem. https://gatling.io https://gatling.io

brabel 4y ago
Looks like K6 is basically Gatling but with a JS-based DSL while Gatling uses Scala (or anything JVM-based like Java/Groovy/Kotlin)... there's also Locust[1] which is Python-based. What I really wanted was an interactive tool, like old LoadUI used to do (Wikipedia, nicely, still has the old screenshots which show how cool it used to look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoadUI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoadUI)... because until you run tests, you just don't know what kind of load you can throw at the server (and whether you're hitting CPU/Memory/Bandwitdth limits instead of server limits). Visual Components were written in a scripting DSL (Groovy based) and dynamically loaded so you could change the code even while the test ran... really awesome stuff, a bit like coding in Lisp with a visual facade on top. Based on existing tools, it should be relatively easy to build something like that and I am surprised there seems to be nothing of the kind. I've always wanted to do it myself, maybe one day if no one else finally tackles the problem. [1] https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/ https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/
i_like_apis 4y ago
Disagree. Old? I guess, but that doesn’t mean bad … it has recent feature development and is currently maintained. Crusty is not an adjective I would use, which seems like more ageism. It’s not an amazing GUI, but it’s very powerful. It will do whatever you want. It's quite flexible and easy to define what I need it to do, to store and load configuration, and it has very meaningful reports. All of these things are pretty easy. A one-size-fits all paid service could give you 3-click interactions and glossy charts, but at the cost of control and understanding what's really going on, and you're more likely to have wrong assumptions about what's happening. Summary: load testing is just complicated enough that it requires effort, thought, and a good toolset. Also K6 may be good or whatever, but it is a paid service. JMeter is free.

brabel 4y ago

Looks like K6 is basically Gatling but with a JS-based DSL while Gatling uses Scala (or anything JVM-based like Java/Groovy/Kotlin)... there's also Locust[1] which is Python-based. What I really wanted was an interactive tool, like old LoadUI used to do (Wikipedia, nicely, still has the old screenshots which show how cool it used to look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoadUI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoadUI)... because until you run tests, you just don't know what kind of load you can throw at the server (and whether you're hitting CPU/Memory/Bandwitdth limits instead of server limits). Visual Components were written in a scripting DSL (Groovy based) and dynamically loaded so you could change the code even while the test ran... really awesome stuff, a bit like coding in Lisp with a visual facade on top. Based on existing tools, it should be relatively easy to build something like that and I am surprised there seems to be nothing of the kind. I've always wanted to do it myself, maybe one day if no one else finally tackles the problem. [1] https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/ https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/

i_like_apis 4y ago

Disagree. Old? I guess, but that doesn’t mean bad … it has recent feature development and is currently maintained. Crusty is not an adjective I would use, which seems like more ageism. It’s not an amazing GUI, but it’s very powerful. It will do whatever you want. It's quite flexible and easy to define what I need it to do, to store and load configuration, and it has very meaningful reports. All of these things are pretty easy. A one-size-fits all paid service could give you 3-click interactions and glossy charts, but at the cost of control and understanding what's really going on, and you're more likely to have wrong assumptions about what's happening. Summary: load testing is just complicated enough that it requires effort, thought, and a good toolset. Also K6 may be good or whatever, but it is a paid service. JMeter is free.