[JMeter]How to test the maximum number of threads that a PC can generate

Question

I am trying to perform load testing on a single API endpoint.

Using JMeter, I need to benchmark how many threads I can generate using my local machine and existing internet connection before some crash, system instability or bottleneck occurs.

Does anyone have an idea of how I could benchmark and report that?

I am using apache-jmeter-5.0 on Windows 7.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It depends on:

• Your machine hardware specifications
• Your machine software (32-bit or 64-bit OS and JVM)
• The nature of your JMeter test (response time, request and response sizes, number of preprocessors, postprocessors, assertions)
• JMeter configuration. Being a normal Java program JMeter needs to be tuned for high loads

So you can measure it as follows:

1. Make sure to monitor operating system baseline health metrics (CPU, RAM, Network, Disk, Swap) on JMeter side. The majority of operating systems have built-in tools for this, however if you don't have administrator account - collecting metrics might be tricky, in this case you could use JMeter PerfMon Plugin
2. It would be also good to monitor JVM metrics like Heap usage and GC frequency/time using i.e. JVisualVM
3. Start your test with 1 user and gradually increase the load until the usage of CPU, RAM, etc. starts exceeding i.e. 90% of total available capacity. When it happens - see how many virtual users were online using i.e. Active Threads Over Time plugin - this is how many users you can mimic for particular this test on particular this machine. If anything changes - you will need to re-do the assessment.