Java is a programming language that you can use to build everything from systems to apps and websites. However, when it comes to load testing Java applications there are some special considerations to take into account. In this post, I’d like to cover performance test tools for the Java ecosystem, the biggest differences between these tools and traditional testing frameworks, and how you can get started with each of them today.
Ever wondered what are the best performance testing tools that can be used for java applications? While they are many companies that offer professional that they are generally too expensive for most organizations. However, there are several free performance testing tools for java applications. Let us discuss them in detail below.
The Eclipse Memory Analyzer
Memory monitoring tools are one of the most important parts of Java performance testing tools. It includes memory usage, memory performance and memory leaks monitoring. The Eclipse Memory Analyzer does all that by monitoring your Java heap usage. Initially, all the Java objects are stored in the free memory called the heap. When you run an application, the memory is taken from the heap. If the heap is full, previous objects are then needed to be discarded to make space for new objects. These changes in heaps need to be smooth and fluent as a disruptive process can create a performance bottleneck.
The Eclipse Memory Analyzer is a full-stack Java heap analyzer primarily made to help developers monitor their memory consumption and set rules to manage memory usage. Developers can use the Memory Analyzer tool to analyze the heap memory. It can be used to calculate the sizes of objects to ensure precise loading and deletion of objects from the heap. With such extreme memory performance monitoring, it also proves to be a great tool for memory leak identification.
BlazeMeter
BlazeMeter is a paid tool that allows developers to quickly spin up performance tests for web and mobile applications as well as microservices and APIs. It integrates with popular open-source tools (like the aforementioned JMeter and Selenium) and has a UI that allows for easy and replicable load testing.
While it’s a premium product, it’s evidently popular for enterprise companies who don’t want to commit development resources and money to creating reliable load testing solutions.
Stagemonitor
Stagemonitor is an open source application performance monitoring tool. While APM tools like this are typically associated with production, Stagemonitor can be used during development as well. While it does offer some similar features to XRebel during development, the user experience and functionality aren’t nearly as polished.
For production performance monitoring, however, Stagemonitor provides robust functionality that make it a popular, free, choice among Java APM tools.
JProfiler
JProfiler by EJ Technologies is another popular Java performance tuning tools used for assessing system performance, profiling threads, and finding memory leaks. Used for performance tuning, developers can identify inefficient memory consumption and use that information to fix the underlying issue.
However, JProfiler (and other profiling tools) have a large overhead – definitely not ideal to be running on most developer machines.
XRebel/JRebel
When it comes to discovering performance issues in Java applications and fixing those issues, the combination of XRebel and JRebel may be the best option available. XRebel allows developers to check request performance end to end to discover performance issues during development. Then, once the developer is ready to make the change, JRebel allows the developer to skip the redeploy process and see that change instantly. Then, with XRebel, the developer can see whether or not the change had the desired performance impact.
With the average Java developer spending hours each week waiting on redeploys, that can mean more efficient performance improvements and faster time to market. Add recent improvements to the Eclipse and IntelliJ plugins that allow the two tools to be used simultaneously via the IDE, and XRebel/JRebel are a must-have combination for Java developers.
Zipkin
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system that allows developers to troubleshoot performance issues in distributed service architectures. The main features that set Zipkin apart from other tracing tools is its ability to both search for trace criteria via log file ID, service, operation name, and even duration. The diagramming feature is also nice because it helps developers to visualize traces via a dependency diagram.
Zipkin was originally developed by Twitter, but has since transitioned into open source with OpenZipkin.
Stackify Prefix
Stackify Prefix is another option for Java tracing tools. In addition to helping developers trace distributed requests, it offers code improvement suggestions for easy fixes. There are two versions of Prefix, with the premium version providing features that make it comparable to XRebel. On the APM side, Stackify also has a paid APM solution called Retrace.
LoadNinja
LoadNinja is a cloud-based load testing and performance testing tool for java web applications and web services. It helps Java developers and performance engineers to ensure if their Java web applications are robust and scalable. Its unique features include script-less testing and the use of real browsers instead of load emulators. LoadNinja assists java developers with Browser-based metrics with some great analytics and reporting features.
Retrace by Stackify
Retrace is another excellent Java performance testing tool by Stackify. It is an application performance management (APM) product for Java applications. APM software is specifically designed to guide java developers in understanding the performance of all their applications in a better way. Developers can quickly and easily identify which web requests are taking the most time and the reasons behind them.
Retrace is a unique product as compared to several other APM products because it is primarily designed for developers to use. More often than not, APM solutions are used by IT operations for the reason that it does not give much control to the users. But in the case of Retrace, it’s actually quite the opposite. Whereas APM products are usually extremely expensive, retrace is purposely made simpler with just core features for performance testing, which makes it very affordable.
Java Application Performance Management tool by AppOptics
This Java Application Performance Management tool by SolarWinds AppOptics offers complete infrastructure and application performance monitoring tools. AppOptics also operates as a Java performance monitoring tool, attracting java developers by allowing the analyses of Java application performances to the code level.
AppOptics also offer features of a Java performance tuner that provides great assistance to Java developers to get end-to-end level insights of their Java infrastructure. This real-time information is also very helpful for optimizing the troubleshooted practices for any Java application.
AppOptics Java performance monitor also comes with a simple and easy user interface that features open integrations for Snap and Telegraf ecosystems. It allows users to add their custom and pre-configured plug-ins, or they can create their own plugins which increases the flexibility for java developers to a great extent.
Java Log Management and Analysis tool by SolarWinds Loggly
Java Log Management and Analysis tool is a cloud-based log management tool used to improve your Java logging process. It allows Java developers to easily merge different logs from their other projects or various web applications, so they can perform a comparative analysis on them together. Its well-designed user interface hosts all the log data on a single dashboard, which makes it very easy to use. It is also equipped with pre-configured graphical charts and graphs to represent data more efficiently and for adding more detail to your Java logging overview.
After collecting, parsing, classifying, and centralizing all the log data from the Java applications, developers can further analyze the data thanks to the automated log analysis tools available. Another great feature by Loggly is advanced searching options and better-querying capabilities. Using those, developers can filter out valuable information from raw Java log data way faster. It is a very powerful tool as even a single specific log can be searched across all Java web applications.
Conclusion:
java applications become common as the world becomes more and more advanced, and as such there is a constant need for performance testing tools that can test and boost up the speed and efficiency of these java applications. Performance testing is very important as it helps you to locate and address bottlenecks within your application’s design, enhance user experience and also address any possible security risks.