JMeter is an excellent open source load testing tool used by thousands of developers. If you want to scale your tests you have some options. You can do it yourself. Or you can scale out your JMeter test on the cloud with RedLine13.

JMeter Load Testing – Do It Yourself

Scaling JMeter beyond 500-1000 users increases complexity and setup time.

Additionally, JMeter reports are usually displayed at the end of the test and only exist locally. There’s no built-in way to share or collaborate.

If you want to do it yourself, here is what you’ll need to consider to run load tests with JMeter.

JMeter works across servers, since JMeter instances support RMI protocol. You’ll have a Master (your desktop) and some number of Agents, say 10. The Master will send commands to  the 10 agents. The issue is that your laptop can not easily connect to your AWS/Cloud environment

Then you’ll play around with network rules, maybe opening up every port which makes your environment insecure.
And when your test finishes you have to clean up all your security issues.

Here’s a very high level overview of what you’d need to do it yourself:

1.  Use the AWS console or API to start up X servers, however many you want.
2.  Install all the required packages on each of those servers.  (You could do this once, create an AMI, copy it to the regions you plan to use, then start servers based on that AMI).
3.  Set up a scheduler to start all the tests at the same time on each of those servers.
4.  You’ll probably want to have a quick way to stop all tests on all servers if it’s impacting your site too much.
5.  Collect the JMeter output files after the test.  This is assuming you don’t want to put in the effort to create real-time reports.
6.  Write tools to combine the JMeter files into a final report.
At this point, you may be asking yourself if this is the best way to do it. And if it takes you more than an hour a month, you could have paid for a monthly subscription to Redline13.

JMeter Load Testing – With RedLine13

Scaling out your JMeter test plan on the cloud in RedLine13 is easy. In this video and subsequent guide, we will walk you through running you first JMeter test on RedLine13.