How to simulate the browser load in JMeter?

Question

We need to test our web application with 100+ users with JMeter tool. Should we use JMeter webdriver plugin to launch the real browsers or can we use the blazemeter plugin to generate the script and run in JMeter? Will the script created with blazemeter simulate the real browser load?

Answer 1

Theoretically you can use real browsers, but be aware that browsers are very resource intensive so my expectation is that you will need at least one CPU core and at 1 GB of RAM per browser instance in order to have enough resources.

This means you will have to go for distributed testing and on average you will have one slave per 5 browsers. If this is something you can afford - go for it. If don't - be aware that you can configure JMeter to behave like a real browser, to wit:

• Tell JMeter to Retrieve All Embedded Resources from HTML Files and Use concurrent pool of 6 threads. This can be done using HTTP Request Defaults, the settings live under "Advanced" tab
• Add HTTP Cache Manager to simulate browser cache
• Add HTTP Cookie Manager to mimic browser cookies
• Add HTTP Header Manager to send browser-like headers (i.e. User-Agent, Accept-Encoding, etc.)
• If your application uses AJAX requests - put the relevant HTTP Request samplers under the Parallel Controller