Apache JMeter vs. NGINX

The key questions I would pose are: how high of a concurrent load do you need to generate against the system? How technically skilled are your personnel that will perform the load testing? How much programmable/scripting/code based control do you desire from the tool? Do you prefer more of a GUI based tool or a programmatic code/scripting based tool? JMeter will be for those that want a GUI, moderate to low scripting/code based control/programmability, moderate to low load generation, and for users experienced in the novice to expert range.

Nginx is well suited for serving any static content - whether that be images, JS files, HTML files, CSS files, videos, etc. If you have a high-traffic website, Nginx will be a great fit because it handles large number of requests extremely efficiently. Nginx has full support on Unix systems, but only has limited support on Microsoft Windows machines.

Incentivized

• Easy to construct Webservices script - You just need to add a sampler with the endpoint, payload and header information. And boom you can run a load test on the service with varying load and capture the response time and throughput. In a commercial tool like Loadrunner or Silkperformer, this process would take at least couple of hours, while with Jmeter we can do this in 10 minutes or less.
• Modularizing the scripts - Jmeter has a very good way of organizing the scripts and the reusability of the existing script (transactions) is also as easy as copy pasting the script.
• Jmeter tests can be run from anywhere, so you can run it from the idle webserver itself if you have some firewall restrictions to test it from your local or other environment.
• Jmeter distributed tests can be spawn from the AWS and results collated to see the performance from different regions in the world.

• Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
• Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
• SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
• Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.

Incentivized

• Even though it has very easy installation, you can run into issues easily. I was ab;e to trigger a test at browser level but couldn't stop the tests. I had to kill it from task manager and then had to reinstall from begining.
• There are so many things in JMeter you can do especially with the sampler for selenium for UI tests. More documentation/webinars etc.. would help the community better.
• The jmx files should have an easy way to be integrated with ci/cd tools and cloud.

Incentivized

• Nginx often requires some initial configuration. It's worth doing, because you'll end up with great results, but it can be slightly daunting for someone to get started using it. Apache might have a leg up in that regard--When you install Apache, typically it's just about ready to do what you want already. But the issue with Apache is that most people skip the extensive tuning phase required after that, and with nginx it becomes more just a part of the configuration process.
• Sometimes, the configuration syntax, even though it's powerful and terse, isn't the most intuitive. Luckily there's plenty of documentation about what things mean and how to accomplish certain things. There may not be much that can be done about this--to have a powerful web server, you need a powerful-enough configuration language.
• The nginx brand is somewhat fragmented, and it can be confusing. There's the open source nginx web server, which I've primarily been referring to. But then there's NGINX Plus, a premium subscription-based service which works with a range of other NGINX products (NGINX WAF, NGINX Amplify, NGINX Controller). I've met a number of people who weren't very familiar with nginx, and instinctively went to nginx.com first, and from there it seems like everything costs money. It's only when they realize there's a different site, nginx.org, that they find what they went looking for.

Incentivized

Price, Wiki and user sharing. Having access to the information provided by the developers and other open source providers is key for me. The ability to share information and get answers directly is very important to success in software testing. And the price of this product currently is amazing. Too many companies charge way too much money for products that are far behind in their value and pertinence

Great value for the product

Incentivized

I can jump right into a new test plan and start building from scratch. The natural progression from test plan to thread group and then designing the basic format of the process is very streamlined and smooth. With only slight modifications I can build out a very complex model from a very basic beginning.

Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.

Incentivized

I have been using JMeter for the last year. By using this tool, you can make sure the system will work under varied loads. It helps us to simulate real time scenarios by creating required virtual users and make sure the application will work under load. Perform load, stress, and stability testing using JMeter.

Incentivized

Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.

Incentivized

I have evaluated LOADUI (web free version) and it was a very unstable tool and I could not rely on those results completely as I was not sure how the tool was performing. It only generated the top 10 less transaction times and when Jmeter was in use, it was very effective in using plugins to accommodate more outputs.

Incentivized

I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives

Incentivized

• It helped to estimate resources required for a particular client requirement. For example if the client wants the application to be used by 500 users for 1 hour, based on the load test we perform for 500 users and 1 hour we recommend resources and their capabilities.
• Jmeter was used to identify bottleneck. This would lead to better performance.
• Jmeter was used to identify failures as well.

• When we first migrated our primary bidding environment architecture to Nginx, it was under duress due to Apache's inability to keep up when we consolidated away from an HAproxy model to a central HTTP proxy. So we even when we did not know what we were doing, we were able to make it work in a bad situation, and everyone was quite happy.
• The biggest complaint I have is that I find the module compilation requirements for nginx+ rather burdensome. If we pay for Nginx+, I'd love to see then have pre-built modules for ready for each release of more modules. We are spending our own time engineering an in-house solution for module testing for nginx+ releases, which is disappointing.
• I've also, as the primary Nginx person at my organization, inserted my expertise into other projects, and have saved our company lots of money getting rid of big $$$ appliances for general SSL proxying.
• Speaking of Nginx replacing SSL appliances, we had an instance where we had to suddenly enable elliptic-curve SSL ciphers and our big $$$ appliances (you know who they are), were falling over. Even their SSL accelerator cards, after all, are just a few extra cores to process SSL. But in an environment of our size, we use DNS to spread the load to hundreds of frontend proxies with dozens of cores each to spread this load out, all at a lower price than ONE of the appliance pairs running Nginx. We couldn't even tell the change in load in our Nginx architecture when we enabled the ciphers.