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Gatling

Introduction to Gatling

We are living in the world of technologies, it changes the way we work, the way we look at the things. We search queries in google, do shopping online, share a moment in Facebook, chat with our childhood friends irrespective of where they live. Everyone likes if the tasks are simplified or automated by online solutions and gives more sophistication on our needs. Hence it is more important to design the web application by considering the performance factors such as concurrency, response time, fault tolerance, scalability. Though there are so many load testing tools available in the market, JMeter and Gatling are considered as widely used performance testing tools. Both JMeter and Galing are open source tools , Gatling also has enterprise version ‘Gatling Frontline’ “https://gatling.io/gatling-frontline/

We had seen already about JMeter and how it helps QA to identify performance bottlenecks without worrying much on coding part as JMeter offers built-in components like Logical controllers, Samplers for protocols like http,ftp,Soap,Jms etc…, listeners for reports, Config elements like CSVDatasetConfig for customizing user data, Pre-Processors , Post-Processors such as Regex-Extractor, JMXMon for Monitoring the heap parameters of the Web application. Indeed JMeter is easy to use and it servers the purpose of finding the performance bottleneck, we have to agree on the fact that it has JMX format which makes script changes challenging.

Introduction on Gatling
Gatling is developed and maintained by Stephene Landelle. Gatling is well known for its speed and performance as it is built on AKKA Engine, Scala language based. Gatling works on asynchronous model. Gatling does not lock the thread at the jvm level, so there is no one user per thread concept. After thread completes it tasks , it will be released and takes the next task. Currently Gatling supports more on HTTP protocol , also they support JMS protocol.

As per https://gatling.io/performancetesting ,it has code-like scripting  which can help in continuous delivery pipeline. Gatling Domain Specific Language (DSL) helps easy-to-read for everyone.

Download Gatling from the following location, Latest version is Gatling 2.1.7
http://gatling.io/#/download

When you open Gatling you can see the following folders

bin
It has gatling recorder and gatling to run simulations for both windows and linux

conf
Gatling configuration files are placed here

lib
lib folder has Gatling Jar files , Scala libararies, netty libraries

results
results folder basically consists of simulation results, html files

target
where simulation class files can be found

user-files
user files are placed under data folder of this user-files directory.
simulation files are inside /user-files/simulation folder.