Installing k6 Locally to Debug Tests

When developing your k6 tests, you will likely want to debug them before deploying to the cloud. This is especially important as your test grows more sophisticated and becomes more complex, and you will inevitably want confirmation that your test is performing as expected. By installing k6 on your local machine, you can debug your tests in near real-time with direct feedback from the k6 engine. In this brief post, we will show you how toRead More →

k6 vs JMeter

When it comes to load testing, there are two platforms which must be mentioned.  k6 and JMeter have established themselves as the de facto standards in the performance testing space. In this article, we will compare and contrast the features of each, to help you better decide which technology is right for you. A Brief History JMeter was introduced more than 20 years ago, and in that time has become one of the most utilized performanceRead More →

k6 Browser Tests vs. Selenium

The landscape of browser testing has traditionally been dominated by tools such as Selenium which incorporate a real web browser (e.g., Chromium) and orchestrate prepared tasks against a target test site. This differs from other popular load testing frameworks such as JMeter where the basic HTTP requests are sent and the responses directly analyzed. Browser testing confers the advantage of interacting with a website in the same way that a user would. This is achieved byRead More →

Getting Started with k6 Load Tests on RedLine13

As one of the five major test types supported on our platform, RedLine13 offers the ability to run your k6 load tests in the cloud. Tests are defined in k6 using the JavaScript syntax, centered around simplicity and extensibility. It is a developer-centric performance testing tool that affords scalability to test designers for scripting, execution, and analysis of load tests. Since it was introduced, k6 has steadily risen in popularity to become one of the deRead More →

Dynamic Requests from Code

One of the challenges that often presents itself when testing modern web applications is the ubiquitous reliance on asynchronous requests embedded in the user experience. It is possible to replicate most of these actions purely using request samplers in JMeter. However, there are many cases where it is desirable to get the response for a simple task – especially where it helps us attain our main test objectives. There may also be a need to requestRead More →

JMeter Assertions to Control Test Flow

Creating a JMeter performance test plan often involves simulating a series of requests.  Whether we intend to run one request sometimes depends on if the previous request was successful – in essence creating a branched-logic flow.  In this brief post, we will show you how to use JMeter assertions to control the flow of your test. Conditional Test Flow In a previous post, we covered all the different types of JMeter assertions that are available.  Here,Read More →

The JMeter Random Controller vs Random Order Controller

When it comes to introducing random variability within test plan execution, there are two similarly named plugins for JMeter which are up to the task.  Each of these applies randomization to your tests, but in different ways.  In this brief post, we will analyze the similarities and differences between the JMeter Random Controller and the Random Order Controller. The Random Controller is one of two built-in logical controllers for randomization. When you add an instance ofRead More →

All the Ways to Compare JMeter Load Tests

In this post, we will review and compare the different approaches available for comparing two or more JMeter load tests. This is a task we are frequently asked, and the answer often depends ultimately on the requirements of your project. Some of these methods may be used to generate one-off comparisons, while others comprise a system of data collection for comparing many tests over extended runs. We will briefly explain the premise for each of theseRead More →

Using ChatGPT to Analyze JMeter Load Test Results

In a previous post we discussed how ChatGPT could be used to assist and partially automate JMeter test plan creation. In this post, we will explore how ChatGPT can be used to help analyze and compare JMeter load test results. I’d like to take a more illustrative approach showing the types of tasks that ChatGPT is good at solving. This will give you a better idea of how to structure queries and get the most outRead More →

Compare JMeter Test Results

A common approach to load testing often involves running a series of load tests to ascertain the performance of a target test application. The question that is sometimes asked is how to compare JMeter test results from two or more runs of a similar JMeter test on the same graph. In this article we will show you how to compare the results of two separate load tests using the Merge Results plugin. In a previous postRead More →