In most real world web application environments the machine running the web
application is not the machine which is sitting on your desk. However to
get a true estimate of performance you would like to be measuring the
true response time of your server, not any (highly variable) network
bottle-necks that might exist between you and the machine on which your web
application is running. At the same time using a GUI especially a Java
GUI over the network is at best painful (using Un*x and X) and at times not
possible (using windows).
To solve this problem JMeter provides a client-server architecture for load
and performance testing which allows the JMeterEngine (the tester) to
reside and run on your application server while the configuration GUI and
visualization executes on the development machine. This offers a number
of features:
-
True performance measurment without network bottlenecks
-
Fast responsive GUI
-
Saving of test samples to a local machine
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Managment of multiple JMeterEngines from a single machine