Performance Testing Books
Performance testing is a very interesting area. From one side, it is rather an established discipline with thousands of people involved. From another side, there is not much information about it considering 20+ years of history. And, in particular, not many books. We have a lot of books about performance modeling, performance analysis, capacity planning, tuning and optimization – but very few books about performance testing per se.
One issue with performance testing is that it is tool-dependent. So talking about performance testing you have a choice of making it tool-independent (thus making the discussion rather generic) or use a specific tool for illustration (thus somewhat limiting potential readers to users of this particular tool).
There are a couple of good generic books: Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications () or The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance by Ian Molyneaux.
Still it would be a challenge for somebody new to performance testing to start from such book: it is difficult to understand generic wisdom when you miss the basic stuff. Many everyday challenges of performance testing – like I described in the Performance Testing: The Art of Scripting post – are almost impossible to illustrate without specific examples.
Another side would be tools manuals, tutorials, and classes. It is very surprising that actually no decent books about load testing tools were published for 20+ years of their history. So it is nice to see Performance Testing With JMeter 2.9 by Bayo Erinle published by Packt Publishing (available on Amazon).
It is, of course, a rather basic book. I don’t think that it would be very useful to experienced JMeter users. However, it may be very good for somebody who is doing their first steps in performance testing and need step-by-step tutorial to introduce them into the topic. Perhaps users of other load testing tools may benefit from the book if they want a quick introduction into JMeter (and don’t want spent time figuring out what is what in documentation). The book does exactly what the title says: explains one way of how basic performance testing may be done with JMeter 2.9. It doesn’t deviate much into available options (which exist in abundance), doesn’t talk much about generic principles of performance testing or performance engineering. However, if complemented by more generic books mentioned above, the book may be a good starting point for a journey into performance testing (especially considering that no other alternatives worth mentioning available except tool-related documentations and articles).
The book is 130 pages long and topics covered may be seen from the chapter names:
Chapter 1: Performance Testing Fundamentals
Chapter 2: Recording Your First Test
Chapter 3: Submitting Forms
Chapter 4: Managing Sessions
Chapter 5: Resource Monitoring
Chapter 6: Distributed Testing
Chapter 7: Helpful Tips
These 130 pages include step-by-step instruction (with screenshots) of installing and configuring JMeter, Tomcat (used for resource monitoring), and Vagrant/Puppet/AWS (used for distributed testing).
Suggestions to create and run scripts against public sites such as Apache and Google sound rather questionable to me. Providing a sample web site built to accompany the book to run other exercises against looks like a much more interesting and valid approach (assuming that the web site stays up and running).
Overall, I guess, the book fulfills its purpose to introduce using JMeter 2.9 for basic performance testing and may be a good starting point for a beginner. Although I am not sure that the author always chooses the simplest ways to introduce topics. And I definitely advise not to stop there if you want to become a good performance tester.
