Don’t you just hate it when your website is slow? This directly impacts your performance rates. There are many factors that will affect or influence your website’s performance rate. You can, therefore, carry out some of the most critical steps necessary to improve the performance rate of your website. One of the most effective ways to do this is through choosing the right performance testing tools in java
Performance testing is about ensuring the application you’re developing meets the users’ expectations. Automated performance tests are part of continuous delivery which in turn helps to ensure that an application functions correctly in production. To find out what tools in Java exist to perform performance tests, keep reading.
JMeter
JMeter is an open-source tool by Apache used for load and stress testing Java applications. JMeter can be used for many application, server, and protocol types, including both static and dynamic resources. Additionally, it has a variety of extensions that can help to record and visualize the resulting test data.
Because JMeter is widely-used, and open-source, it’s very popular within the Java development community.
Gatling
Gatling is an open-source performance testing tool that focuses on load testing. The free version has integrations for Maven, SBT, Gradle, and Jenkins(focusing on local testing environments), while the premium version has integrations for Bamboo, TeamCity, and Grafana (focusing on more complicated CI/CD environments). Also of note, the free version doesn’t support distributed applications — which can be a big detractor.
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:
The importance of performance testing grows with the growing complexity of applications, but still not so many developers are aware of it. Most likely you have already noted the importance of performance testing when you have tested any application.