Flentas | Setting up distributed jmeter environment on aws windows instance

Load/ Capacity Testing

Load testing is a non-functional testing performed to determine how a system performs in the terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. It also can serve to investigate, measure, validate or verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage.

Why JMeter?

It is an open source tool.
Can load test multiple types of servers
- Web – HTTP, HTTPS
- SOAP
- Database via JDBC
- LDAP
- JMS
- Mail – POP3(S) and IMAP (S)
User friendly GUI
Multithreading framework
Caching and Cookies can be enabled and it impact as such as it is executing in the web browser.
Controllers are configurable and can monitor the server performance
Test Results can be captured in various formats

Why Remote/ Distributed Testing?

In the event that your JMeter client machine is unable, performance-wise, to simulate enough users to stress your server or is limited at network level, an option exists to control multiple, remote JMeter engines from a single JMeter client
By running JMeter remotely, you can replicate a test across many low-end computers and thus simulate a larger load on the server
One instance of the JMeter client can control any number of remote JMeter instances, and collect all the data from them. This offers the following features:
- Saving of test samples to the local machine
- Management of multiple JMeterEngines from a single machine
- No need to copy the test plan to each server – the client sends it to all the servers

Prerequisites:

AWS account and basic knowledge
Basic JMeter Knowledge.
Firewalls on both the Instances should be turned off.
Java should be installed on the machines and class path should be set.
The Instances used should be in the same subnet (Public).
The Inbound and Outbound rules of Security group under which the Instance is launched should be open
Same Version of JMeter on all the Instances

Starting Instances

Launch Instances on AWS in the same public subnet.
Once you launch the Instance do a RDP.

Installing JMeter

Download and Install JMeter on both the Instances from http://jmeter.apache.org/download_jmeter.cgi
Note: The version of JMeter installed on all the Instances should be same.

Master Slave Configuration

Master Instance

The Master Instance will be the Instance on which JMeter GUI will be running and controlling the tests
For the Masters Instance following changes have to be made in the Jmeter.properties file
Jmeter.properties file is placed under JMeter bin folder.
Go to Remote Hosts and RMI configuration section
- In the remote_hosts field mention the private IP addresses of the slave Instances.
- e.g.: remote_hosts=10.1.1.14, 10.1.1.5, etc.
For master Instance update the server.rmi.create field to false, also uncomment the field by removing "#"
- server.rmi.create=false
Uncomment the "mode=Asynch" field.
Uncomment "asynch.batch.queue.size=" and update the value to 250
- e.g.: asynch.batch.queue.size=250
(This setting denotes that, if your machine IP is used as SLAVE; it will serve 250 users max to run on.)
NOTE: Say you want to run a test on 5 remote slaves with 1000 of users; your Number of Threads (users) in Thread Group will be 200. (200*5 = 1000 users)

Slave Instances

The Slave Instance will be the Instance on which will be used my Master Instance to run the tests.
For the Slave Instance following changes have to be made in the Jmeter.properties file
Jmeter.properties file is placed under JMeter bin folder.
Go to Remote Hosts and RMI configuration section
- In the remote_hosts field mention the private IP address of the Master Instances.
- e.g.: remote_hosts=10.1.1.14, 10.1.1.5, etc.
For slave Instance update the server.rmi.create field to false, also uncomment the field by removing "#"
- server.rmi.create=true
Uncomment the "mode=Asynch" field.
Uncomment "asynch.batch.queue.size=" and update the value to 250
- e.g.: asynch.batch.queue.size=250
(This setting denotes that, if your machine IP is used as SLAVE; it will serve 250 users max to run on.)
NOTE: Say you want to run a test on 5 remote slaves with 1000 of users; your Number of Threads (users) in Thread Group will be 200. (200*5 = 1000 users)

Running the Tests

When all the configurations are made in the Master and Slave Instances run the "JMeter-server" Windows batch File from all the slave instances.
This file is located in the bin directory of JMeter

Once it is done in all the slave Instances, start the JMeter GUI of the Master Instance.
Develop a sample script.
In the Master Instance go to "Run" and click on remote start. All the private IP's of the configured slave Instances will be displayed.
User can also start all the slave Instances at once by clicking on "Remote Start All".