JMeter vs IBM Rational Performance Tester

• Easy of use - in generate load like HTTP requests, and processing/analyzing the responses. No coding is necessary at the basic level, just need to understand load testing and the infrastructure being tested.
• Automatic management of things like cookies to help with session state support - so you don't specifically have to worry about it or handle it
• Lots of testing/configuration options to suit your needs in making the right load generation (sampling requests), and analyzing the results, including any pre and post processing of the results first. Things like the Beanshell/BSF pre/post processors, response assertion, regular expression extractor, XPath extractor, CSV data set config
• There is a JMeter cloud service called BlazeMeter that I think would be useful for those that need to scale up high load without provisioning their own systems. I've not personally tried it though, but I recently attended a meetup presentation that highlighted nice useful features that BlazeMeter provides. One should evaluate the service if they are considering JMeter and need to expand beyond existing hardware resources.

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• Live Monitoring of Performance Testing Metrics
• Easier Test Data Parameterization
• Performance Tests Scheduler
• Server Resource Monitoring
• Great Reports that can be Exported as HTML Reports

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• Jmeter requires many tweaks with respect to its configuration file and thread properties. users need to edit theses files themselves. There could be some interface where we can edit this fields.
• Jmeter cannot handle more threads and hangs up when we increase the number of threads. This causes lot of inconvenience. In these situations, user can be notified that such change would be lead to slow performance so that user can do as required. The same appears when we try to view huge files on graph listener.
• Jmeter should optimize the read and write access to output csv since it acts as overhead to the I/O performance. This affects our test results for the application which we are testing.

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• Memory utilization could have been improved.(Eats up system's RAM)! It may crash if a test is conducted with the heavy load if adequate RAM is not available in the VM/host machine.
• Licensing could have been made simpler. IBM's licensing method is difficult to follow.
• Support for protocols other than HTTP. Not really up to the current trend.

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• Good ROI on improving the performance of the application.
• Finding issues in the performance.
• Benchmark the performance results.
• CON: Need skillset to create and maintain the scripts in Java.
• Scripts are reusable and it is executed by any user.
• Need Client and Server setup to execute the scripts.

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• Accuracy in metrics, thus improving system's performance
• Costs less compared to competitor like HP LoadRunner
• Helped the team of beginners learn things quickly

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