Jmeter Spike Testing

Question

I am literally new to Jmeter and have just started exploring the tool. I am developing tests to perform load and stress test on a website where the peak load is 10000 users an hour. The stats are something like:

Hour Index Users 0 2,728 1 1,656 2 1,123 3 1,058 4 1,174 5 1,710 6 3,524 7 5,808 8 7,505 9 8,432 10 9,113 11 9,577 12 9,814 13 9,674 14 10,028 15 9,781 16 8,445 17 8,156 18 6,193 19 6,175 20 5,922 21 5,641 22 4,694 23 3,068

I want to use the ramp up and ramp down feature along with Spike in load but unsure which thread group should i use? The Ultimate Thread group or the Stepping Thread group. Also unsure of how should i configure these thread groups. Any pointers would be greatly helpful.

Thanks in anticipation.

Answer 1

As per Stepping Thread Group documentation

This plugin is deprecated and should not be used. Use Concurrency Thread Group instead.

So Stepping Thread Group doesn't come into play.

Now you need to make a choice between Ultimate Thread Group and Concurrency Thread Group which should be simple as:

• Ultimate Thread Group is about threads (or virtual users) which seems to be more applicable for your case
• Concurrency Thread Group is about concurrency (or requests per second) which is very useful when you need to generate certain throughput in terms of hits per second rather than need to mimic certain amount of virtual users.

So I would go for the Ultimate Thread Group. With regards to "how to configure" - just use the above values as they are, example configuration for first 8 hours would be something like:

You can install Ultimate Thread Group using JMeter Plugins Manager.