JMeter non-GUI distributed testing

Since I'm now in performance testing, I've been using JMeter quite a lot in the recent months. I've also spent a lot of time on google after I read the whole JMeter reference guide. No reason not to share little things now that the problems are solved.

Distributed testing with JMeter is supposed to be a very easy task according to the official guide. Yet, for me it didn't work straight away. I blame it on the way we deployed the nodes (using puppet master that screwed up configuration at first), and you may also get this if you deploy JMeter by copy-pasting JMeter folder between nodes. Solution to all my problems turned out to be really simple, but maybe writing it down will save someone else time on googling.

My environment: 

- few CentOS 6.3 VMs, one of them arbitrary chosen to be JMeter master (others are slaves). No GUI access to any of the nodes;

- my local machine with GUI JMeter.

Steps to make it work and get results back

1) on each JMeter node modify $JMETER_HOME/bin/jmeter

- make sure heap size is configured as you want it

- if you want Visual JVM monitoring, make sure host is set to a proper IP address on each node

2) on each slave node modify jmeter-server

- make sure that RMI_DEF_HOST is explicitely set to that node's IP address

3) on JMeter master modify jmeter.properties file

- set remote_hosts to a list of all JMeter nodes except the master itself

4) on each slave node start/restart JMeter server. Either use service jmeter restart (if you installed JMeter server as a service) or kill current JMeter server thread, and then start it with $JMETER_HOME/bin/jmeter-server

5) if your testscript uses any external files, you have to put those files on each slave node into the same place, which is specified in testscript. From my experience it's safer to specify full path rather than relative (i.e. /etc/testscripts/in/userlist.csv instead of in/userlist.csv), because relative paths are resolved based on the folder from which you are executing jmeter, and not from the testscript location

6) in your testscript configure listeners to save results to files. Again, it is safer to use full paths instead of relative. JMeter will gather results from all slave nodes and save them on master node

7) place your testscript on JMeter master and run it with a command like this:

$JMETER_HOME/bin/jmeter -n -t <test script> -r

- additionally if you want to get some graphs, enable appropriate listener in your testscript and run jmeter with additional parameter -l <filename.jtl>. Note that this creates significant additional load on JMeter nodes, so it probably shouldn't be used when it is not absolutely necessary.

- additionally you can configure JMeter Summarizer to save and show aggregated responce times (one set of results for all samplers) during the run. This blog post does a good job describing how to use it. For me it wasn't of much use because I needed to get aggregated response times separately for each of the many samplers.

8) to see aggregated results, copy files that were generated by listeners from JMeter master to your local machine, run JMeter in GUI mode, open your testscript, choose appropriate listener and point to the file. JMeter will process the file and give you aggregate table as if you ran the script in GUI mode from the beginning. Same works for graph listeners - just point them to a generated *.jtl file.

9) oh, and if you need to stop the distributed test in non-GUI mode, use $JMETER_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh script on the JMeter Master - it will send "shutdown all" to slave nodes.

Hope that was helpful. I know I would be glad to find this when I first googled for "jmeter distributed testing get aggregate response times", or "jmeter master cannot connect to slaves", or "jmeter master doesn't get results back from slaves". :-)