JMeter Tips and Tricks Part-1

In this part I will share some finding of mine using Jmeter. I have not done all on purposely. Some of them are from different blogs that I have read so far.

General
-Always use latest Version(for maximum support for low resource uses)
-Always use latest jre
- It is better to use 4gb+ RAM for high load execution(with quad core CPU)[more user , more resource]

Test Plan

-Use JMeter GUI for Test Plan and Test Debugging.
 -Davide your test plan into different Thread Group based on User Type
-Use Transaction Controller for measuring time specifically for a request as well as whole set of request..
-Use Simple Controller and Random Order Controller to send request differently under a thread group
-Try to avoid un-necessary uses of Post-Processor and Assertions.
- Avoid Body(unescaped) if you use Regular Expression Extractor. Try to use it efficiently.
-Use Response Assertion and Size Assertion (or Duration assertion)
-Avoid Xpath/XML/XML Schema Assertions (high memory and CPU hungry)
-It is good to use script(I am using perl, Groovy is also good)
-It is better to use recording by http proxy than manually entry of http request(time saver). Use filter for excluding and including necessary requests.
-Use parametrize values and separate text file[with CSV Data Set Config ] to reading those value for testing(Ex- Username and password or search text)
-Use variables in test plan to use it all over test plan.
-Use test action (a sampler) to apply time specific behavior.
-It is better to use thread group using from plugin. If you use default thread group, try to parametrize that, so that it can be run-time configurable.[This is commandline user and loop count parameter jmeter test plan run command  jmeter -t TestPlan.jmx -Jusers=10 -Jcount=50]


Test Debugging 
-Debug you test case using View Results Tree listener.
-Disable view result size limit by enabling this line from jmeter.properties(you can see any of my configuring jmeter for basic idea)
 view.results.tree.max_size=0 
 

 Custom Coding(using extension) 
..(Coming Soon, I have not done yet)


Test Execution
-Run JMeter in Non GUI mode on Test Execution.
-Unless you need on purpose, try to avoid executing test in distributed way. It is very resource hungry.
-if we need Remote testing, Try to run jmeter in StrippedBatch mode(You can see this post for how to run jmeter in this mode)
 
Reporting
-Remove all Listener while execution , save only the test results.We can extract reports from result file.
-Use .CSV format to save results. either you can edit jmeter.properties or user.properties for enabling CSV file result saving options(For help,you can see this post)
-Best to use Aggregate Graph, Response Time Graph, and  plugin graphs(see this post for plugin installation)

...To be continued. ....(I will add more on time to time)

Thanks...:)