Number of user generated from your local machine depends on your local machine specs but what if you can generate more users with number of tricks.

1. Don’t use listners

Listners consumes a lot of memory to be able to display information and do the necessary calculations , the less listners you use the more memory is available to generate users.

Use Simple Data Wriiter to store all of your run data and after the execution is finished you can get all information you need from .jtl file created.

*We have an article explaining how to use Simple data writer , see the following link

https://thetesttherapist.com/2019/01/27/save-run-results-with-simple-data-writer-in-apache-jmeter

2. Increase Java Heap Size Limit

We’re going to change the amount of memory reserved to JMeter by default to a larger size which allow JMeter to generate more users but you cannot set the memory size to be > 80% of your total system memory

Here is the default value in APache JMeter 5 , the default value is 256m

You can set a new value which is not larger than 80% of your system memory , JMeter will not lunch if you set a memory which is much higher than possible.

*You can change the heap size value when you edit  jmeter.bat file and search for “set HEAP” in notepad or any other editor.

3. Use x64 JDK and Windows

With x64 Windows and JDK you can consume more memory and have a better memory management that will help you generate more users than before.

*With all the above tricks your machine specs cannot exceed a certain boundary related to your hardware , and unfortunately we cannot calculate precisely how much a machine with a specific specs can generate and also it is differ from test to test.But these tricks help you get the max out of your machine before thinking to add a new machine to generate more or move to the cloud.

You want to execute a JMeter performance test but you don’t want to exceed a specific number of requests , is it possible?

Yes it is 🙂

What if we can get the value of the current iteration and make a condition to stop the test when reaching a specific values. This can be done as the following

Create a basic JMeter test plan with the essential samplers and listeners

Test plan will have the following :

1. Thread Group
2. Http Sampler
3. If controller
4. Test Action Sampler
5. Summary Report Listener

Thread Group run settings will be as the following :

We will put If controller and a test action as a child for it in the beginning of the test just under the Thread Group.

Everytime you call ${__counter(,)} you got the current iteration number.
in the above example we need to set a maximum of 300 requests (iterations).

“${__counter(,)}” >= 301

So why i put the condition operator to be >=301 because in case of concurrency it will be easier to check for number of iteration after you already finished your 300 iterations , give it a try if you put 300 the test will be stopped at the iteration number 299.

When the condition is true the Test Action will stop the test.

Then you have to add http request , in the example we used “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page”

At the end add summary report to check the number of request and run the test

Summary

With IF Controller and Test Action you can limit your test execution maximum number of requests While you executing a duration based test with multiple threads.

In JMeter default lisnters some values are not provided by default and one of the examples is the max number of user concurrency which sometimes important if you’re executing a test which is not duration based.

In this article we’re going to execute a test with 200 users ramping 1 user each 2 sec and let’s see what is the max user concurrency we can get.

But first we need to install a plugin and add a listner as the following :

1. install jmeter plugin manager from the link below
   https://jmeter-plugins.org/wiki/PluginsManager/
2. After installation , open the plugin manager from jmeter and select the following plugin “3 Basic Graphs” from “Available Plugins” section
   
3.  Make sure that you have a new listner under called “Active Threads Over Time” as the following picture
   

Now everything is in place lets make a quick run.

we’re going to use this fake API website “http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/” in our test

Let’s execute and see the graph results 😉

If we look at the graph above , we got a max of 1 concurrent user during the test run , so lets change the ramping up values and see the changes.

we will modify the thread group to be 200 threads / ramp-up Period : 50 as the following and execute again.

If we look at the graph above , in 2 times during the test we had more than 1 concurrent users. Because this is a simple http call with no business behind we got a smooth run and nearly constant results but in more real life test this graph will help you know the max number of concurrent users during your test.