4 Things You Should Know About JMeter 2.13

JMeter version 2.13 is out - and the change list is extensive! So extensive that it’s not easy to identify the most valuable features. So I did it for you.

Here are the top 4 features in JMeter 2.13:

1. A New Key Performance Indicator (KPI): Connection Times

Now you can view connection times separately. Why is this important? It takes time to connect to a server before making a request and this can have an impact on the response times that you see, especially when an SSL handshake takes place.  For example: at the beginning of a test, there is always a spike in response times, which is normally due to the connections being established. Once the connection has been established, response times will decrease (assuming you’re using the keep-alive connections). It’s important to know if the changes in response times you’re seeing are caused by these connections being established or if they are due to a resource being exhausted. The ability to view connection times was contributed by BlazeMeter as a new feature for JMeter 2.13 to ensure you’ll get far more detailed metrics than before.

A word of warning: the latency in JMeter includes the connection time, this is for backwards compatibility. So you’ll need to subtract the connect time from latency to get pure latency value.

2. Enhanced Reporting

Enjoy better reports! Before, you could only view the 90th percentile on graphs and reports. Now you can configure three percentile levels through JMeter properties (90%, 95% & 99% are defaults), customize them, and view them on an Aggregated Graph.

3. Distributed Testing Improvements

JMeter has improved the performance and reliability of distributed testing. These tests now consume less bandwidth and retry behavior has been added - meaning it’s easy to retry initialization attempts on large-scale tests if some of the remote servers are unavailable or down.

4. A Brand New Look

JMeter website has had a facelift! The latest version is much cleaner and easier on the eye with a new style, colors and fonts. Plus, it now uses responsive design so you can see it on your tablets and smartphones with convenient layout.

Of course, this list doesn’t cover everything. JMeter 2.13 has also added new elements like the New Async BackendListener, bug fixes for HTTP samplers, listeners and timers, and GUI improvements. Check out the page on changes in Apache Meter Version 2.13  for full details.

Writed by Andrey Pokhilko, BlazeMeter.