Administrators and developers panic if a site is strained by the sheer number of visitors – the web shop collapses under the onslaught of customers and only the disk LEDs show signs of life. At those moments, many a thoughtful admin wishes they had taken the time for a stress test.

It is good practice to subject web applications to an extensive load test to avoid unfortunate surprises during production. Only through testing can application developers and responsible webmasters reliably determine which features perform well and which don't.

The Apache Software Foundation offers a very mature application called JMeter [1] as a tool for testing websites. Stefano Mazzocchi, born in Italy and now employed at Google in the US, began to develop JMeter in 1998 in order to complete load tests on the Apache Tomcat server. Mazzocchi, who has been a member of the Apache Jakarta Project Management Committee (PMC) since 1999, then carried on with the tool as a Jakarta sub-project. JMeter, which occupies a niche similar to the Grinder 3 testing tool [2], has been an independent Apache top-level project since 2011.

[...]