Install MySQL

MySQL is a leading open source database server. Download and install the community server edition.¹

Follow the instructions on the web site to start the server.² Create a user and note the username and password. It is good to set the in folder in the standard path variable to access it from any directory.

C:mysql-5.6.36-winx64in>msysqld

The previous command will start the mysql server. Use the following command to log in as the root.

C:mysql-5.6.36-win64in>mysql -u root
mysql> create user "jmeter_user"@"localhost" identified by "mypass";
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> grant all on employees.* to "jmeter_user"@"localhost";
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec)

mysql>

For this example, we will use Employees DB, which is a database that contains a large amount of data (approximately 160MB) spread over six separate tables and consisting of 4 million records in total. The documentation for this database is available on the MySQL web site.³

Download a prepackaged archive of the data from LaunchPad.⁴

Unzip in the employee_db folder.

To set up Employees DB, open the command prompt and enter the following:

C:employees_db>mysql -u jmeter_user -p -t < employees.sql
Enter password: ******

Here is the output:

+-----------------------------+
| INFO                        |
+-----------------------------+
| CREATING DATABASE STRUCTURE |
+-----------------------------+
+------------------------+
| INFO                   |
+------------------------+
| storage engine: InnoDB |
+------------------------+
+---------------------+
| INFO                |
+---------------------+
| LOADING departments |
+---------------------+
+-------------------+
| INFO              |
+-------------------+
| LOADING employees |
+-------------------+
+------------------+
| INFO             |
+------------------+
| LOADING dept_emp |
+------------------+
+----------------------+
| INFO                 |
+----------------------+
| LOADING dept_manager |
+----------------------+
+----------------+
| INFO           |
+----------------+
| LOADING titles |
+----------------+
+------------------+
| INFO             |
+------------------+
| LOADING salaries |
+------------------+

C:employees_db>

Use the console to verify that the data loaded correctly.

C:>mysql -u root;
Mysql> use employees;
mysql> select count(*) from employees;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|   300024 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.16 sec)

If you see this previous output, you have set up the database correctly.

The schema of the database is shown in Figure 10-1.

Figure 10-1. Employee schema

Install JDBC Driver

Download the MySQL JDBC connector.⁵

Unzip and copy the driver to the lib folder of JMeter.

JDBC Test Plan

The JDBC test plan is easy; you’ll see by following an example.

Follow these steps or download JDBCTestPlan.jmx.⁶

1. Create a test plan and give it a meaningful name, such as JDBC Test Plan.

2. Click on Test Plan and go to Edit ➤ Add ➤ Thread (Users). Add Thread Group. Configure Number of Threads ( Users ) as 1 and Loop Count as 1000.

3. Click on Thread Group and go to Edit ➤ Add ➤ Configuration Element to add JDBC Connection Configuration. Configure Variable Name Bound to Pool, Variable Name as jdbcConfig, Database Connection Configuration, Database URL as jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/employees, JDBC Driver class as com.mysql.jdbc.Driver, Username as jmeter_user, and Password as created previously. Choose the defaults for the other parameters (see Figure 10-2).

   

   Figure 10-2. JDBC configuration

4. Click on Thread Group and go to Edit ➤ Add ➤ Samplers to add JDBC Request. Configure it with the Variable Name Bound to the Pool option set to jdbcConfig (this is the same value as configured in the JDBC Connection Configuration). Configure Query as select count (*) from employee where first_name like 'Ge%' (see Figure 10-3).

   

   Figure 10-3. JDBC request sampler

5. Run the test .

Results will be similar to those shown in the following figures.

Check the sampler results of the JDBC request (see Figure 10-4).

Figure 10-4. JDBC request results

Check the JDBC request that JMeter sent to MySQL (see Figure 10-5).

Figure 10-5. JDBC request SQL

Check the response data for the JDBC request (see Figure 10-6).

Figure 10-6. JDBC SQL Response

Look at the performance results as well.

Figure 10-7 shows the result of the test performed on the MySQL database.

Figure 10-7. JDBC graph results

Simulating Mobile Devices

When a browser, including the browser on a mobile device, interacts with the server, it includes a header called the User-Agent. So to pretend that the HTTP request originated on a mobile device/browser, you have to insert the same header value in your request.

You can find a list of User-Agent strings to use for every mobile device by searching the Internet.¹³ You can then use the JMeter HTTP Header Manager to send the appropriate User- Agent string.

The following example uses a User-Agent string of Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5355d Safari/8536.25, which corresponds to a Safari browser running on an iPad (see Figure 10-15).

Figure 10-15. Header manager to set user agent

Simulating Network Speed

The connection speeds of mobile devices are often slow. It is easy to simulate slow connections.

The network speeds are measured using characters per second (cps), which can be calculated using this formula: cps = (target bandwidth in kbps * 1024) / 8

Select your device from the list in Table 10-1.¹⁴

The JMeter property file jmeter.properties has these two properties that you can configure.

httpclient.socket.http.cps=0
httpclient.socket.https.cps=0

Specify these values in the JMETER_HOME/bin/user.properties file.

JMeter to Record User Actions

Earlier in the book, we explored how to use JMeter to record a test script. You could use the same technique to record tests for mobile devices. The only difference is that you configure the mobile device to use JMeter as a proxy.

Install SOAPUI

SoapUI is a free and open source functional testing tool with very good support for SOAP. Download the SoapUI package and then follow these steps to create a new project.¹⁶

1. Go to File ➤ New to create a new project. Choose the Description File and specify the value as Initial WSDL and URL as http://localhost:8080/services/CurrencyService?WSDL. Enable the Create Sample Requests for All Operations checkbox to automatically generate sample SOAP requests (see Figure 10-18).

   

   Figure 10-18. New SOAP project

2. Double-click on Request1 to open the request template on the pane to the right (see Figure 10-19).

   

   Figure 10-19. SOAP request menu

3. Fill in the XML arguments. Set arg0 to USD and arg1 to JPY (see Figure 10-20).

   

   Figure 10-20. SOAP request

4. Click the green arrow to submit. You should see the response shown in Figure 10-21.

   

   Figure 10-21. SOAP response

The WSDL for the Currency SOAP service is located at:

http://localhost:8080/services/CurrencyService?WSDL

You can view the WSDL using a browser (see Figure 10-22).

Figure 10-22. WSDL for the Currency SOAP service

Let’s see how to test SOAP using JMeter with an example.

Follow these steps or download SOAPTestPlan.jmx.¹⁷

1. Create a test plan and give it a meaningful name, such as SOAP Test Plan.

2. Click on Test Plan and go to Edit ➤ Add ➤ Threads (Users). Add Thread Group . Configure Number of Threads ( Users ) as 1 and Loop Count as 1000.

3. Click on Thread Group and go to Edit ➤ Add ➤ Configuration Element to add HTTP Header Manager. Configure Headers Stored in the Header Manager, Name as Content-Type and Value as text/xml (see Figure 10-23).

   

   Figure 10-23. HTTP header manager

4. Click on Thread Group and go to Edit ➤ Add ➤ Sampler. Add HTTP Request. Configure Server Name or IP as localhost, Port Number as 8080, and Path as /services/CurrencyService. Copy the SOAP Request XML, which was generated by the SoapUI earlier, into the body data area (see Figure 10-24).

   

   Figure 10-24. SOAP XML-HTTP request

5. Click on Thread Group and go to Edit ➤ Add ➤ Listener. Add View Results Tree .

6. Run the test.

The results are shown in Figure 10-25.

Figure 10-25. SOAP response XML format