Now we know how to troubleshoot problems and find potential solutions in the systems. There is one more point left to discuss, Web server benchmarking. Without discussing this topic, troubleshooting in Tomcat 7 cannot be marked as complete. It's a process through which we gauge the performance of a web server, also known as Load testing. In this process, we run the server virtually on a heavy load and estimate the real-time performance. This process is very useful if we want to do capacity planning for the web server. There are many tools available for performing load testing on the server such as ApacheBench (ab), JMeter, LoadRunner, OpenSTA, and so on. Let's discuss the commonly used open source tools such as ApacheBench and JMeter. If we do the benchmarking of the server before the go live stage, then we will face less issues in production support. Also, it helps in improving the performance and designing the scalable environment architecture.
ApacheBench is a command-line tool for web server benchmarking. It comes under the Apache HTTP server and is very useful when we want to generate only HTTP threads. It's a single thread process.
JMeter is one of the widely used open source tools used for load testing. This tool is developed under the Apache Jakarta project. It is capable of generating traffic for JDBC, web services, HTTP, HTTPS, and JMS services. It's a desktop software, which does not support all features of browsers. Following are the advantages of JMeter:
- Portable (can be run on any platform)
- Supports multitasking that allows the administrator to test multiple processes
Note
For more information on JMeter and ApacheBench, visit http://jmeter.apache.org/ and http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html respectively.