Website load testing with JMeter

I needed a tool to load test a website I was working on that I knew was going to have a large amount of traffic. In the past I used Apache Benchmark, but I needed a little bit more extensive load testing plan. I found JMeter to be great solution that is quite powerful and extensible, although it has somewhat of a learning curve. I followed the basic directions in the JMeter documentation and created a basic load test for X number of simultaneous connections. This worked great but I also wanted to test authentication, submit forms, or send various types of requests to the server which I found JMeter handled very well. The results generated via "Listeners" can be displayed in a bunch of different formats and if thats not enough, JMeter has support for plugins to output the results in a customized format. Definitely a great tool for load testing web sites and services.

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