I’ve been using JMeter for a long time and during my research, I came across Apache Benchmark, which seemed a bit more simple load testing tool to me.
So my assumption is that; Apache Benchmark is more suitable choice for benchmarking one API at a time. And it won’t be a good choice -and maybe impossible- for performing an end-to-end load test.
But I am also curious about if A/B has any kind of advantages over JMeter in terms of performance / benchmark testing.
Could you please explain?
Thanks…
>Solution :
When it comes to "hammering" the endpoint with simple HTTP Requests ab can be suitable alternative to JMeter as long as you’re fine with the following limitations:
- no control regarding how connections are used/re-used
- no support of other authentication types than Basic (digest, NTLM, Kerberos)
- no control of DNS caching
- no clustered mode of tests execution
- missing metrics like connect time, TTFB, etc. and in general results are quite "poor" comparing to JMeter’s HTML Reporting Dashboard
The only advantage of ab I can think of is lower CPU/Memory footprint