Question

I am currently writing a JMeter plugin to test the fix for a bug that only seems to occur when our web application is under heavy load.

As a general solution to allow load/stress tests to be written to test specific sections of the web application I am think of adding a simple restful web service to call the tests. The main reason to do this is to bypass the browser as what we are interested in testing for this is the business logic and database access layer (legacy inline SQL).

Would this be worth the time and effort or is it possible to use JMeter to test a complex web application that requires authentication and uses Javascript and Ajax heavily.

EDIT

The goal of these tests is to test how the business logic and data access layer handle heavy load situations to ensure there are no bugs or concurrency issues. This is a legacy jsp web application (i.e. written in the early-mid 90s) with mostly inline sql that is in the process of being moved to a DAL layer.

Answer 1

You get several benefits from a exposing a special API just for load tests:

• This API will be stable, the web UI tends to change (inputs, buttons, etc)
• You could design your API so it’s possible to create relevant loading scenarios that are hard to simulate through the web UI
• Creating the loading scenarios will be much easier, whether using JMeter or a similar tool, or just a script using curl

Now all that’s left is estimating how much work creating such an API will take, and whether the benefits are worth it.