This post is about Kafka and the process I have been through recently writing a performance test for an application that subscribes to messages from this technology. The test I ended up with was in the end very straightforward but there were several hurdles that took a while to resolve. I hope that reading this post will hopefully help you avoid them.
Have you abandoned a web service, because it took too long to load? I bet you have, everyone does that every now and then with slow applications. There are a lot of services to check load times, but is it the only thing to check about website’s performance worldwide? Certainly not! It is just one thing to check, not the only one. You may have performance tested the service locally and validated that everything works just fine.
Apache JMeter is a Java open source tool. If you want to run load or performance tests using Apache JMeter, you can use their Graphic User Interface (GUI) and you don’t need to know any programming language, follow the JMeter documentation and you are ready to go to design your API testing scenarios.
Socrates preached, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” This ancient Greek anecdote applies to your modern Apache Kafka project: developers, go forth and load test your real-time application to understand the capacity and limitations of your project before deployment. Failure to do so will cost you time and money (e.g. Robinhood’s outage on a historic trading day). Load testing your real-time applications has three main objectives.
E-commerce is growing globally, forecasts for 2020 promise it to reach over 4 trillion USD and over 4.2 billion USD for retail e-commerce. We are approaching a very special season for online retail business owners: Black Friday, Cyber Monday and preparing for the holiday season. Every team behind an e-commerce business is planning big for this time. Every online store will try to attract as much traffic as possible. Are you planning to do the same?
JMeter Load Testing with thousands of virtual clients from multiple world regions: https://loadfocus.com/jmeter-load-testing
Twitter: https://twitter.com/loadfocus
“JMeter is old technology”, I hear this a lot. “Let’s use this tool or that tool instead of JMeter as it’s the latest”, I hear this a lot. “We need a lightweight tool without the GUI interface to write our tests as that will make us more agile”, I hear this a lot.
Often software developers get to ask themselves the question: Should I just run the tests in the GUI now that I finished developing them? The answer is pretty simple, NO. You should not use the GUI when running the tests. The GUI should be used only for developing the tests.
Why is Apache JMeter very slow when creating and running load tests? If you just downloaded and opened Apache JMeter and the UI it feels very slow, here are some items you can follow to make Apache Jmeter GUI move faster.
It’s September. Students are back to school, whether that is in person or remote. Here in the States, we just celebrated the unofficial end of Summer with Labor Day. Things are likely picking up where you are, which makes it the perfect time to focus on test execution to put yourself ahead. Quality at the expense of speed, or speed at the expense of quality, is likely a challenge you have faced in your development journey.
