Differences between JMeter and Apache Benchmark

Question

I've been using JMeter for a long time and during my research, I came across Apache Benchmark, which seemed a bit more simple load testing tool to me.

So my assumption is that; Apache Benchmark is more suitable choice for benchmarking one API at a time. And it won't be a good choice -and maybe impossible- for performing an end-to-end load test.

But I am also curious about if A/B has any kind of advantages over JMeter in terms of performance / benchmark testing.

Could you please explain?

Thanks...

Answer 1

When it comes to "hammering" the endpoint with simple HTTP Requests ab can be suitable alternative to JMeter as long as you're fine with the following limitations:

• no control regarding how connections are used/re-used
• no support of other authentication types than Basic (digest, NTLM, Kerberos)
• no control of DNS caching
• no clustered mode of tests execution
• missing metrics like connect time, TTFB, etc. and in general results are quite "poor" comparing to JMeter's HTML Reporting Dashboard

The only advantage of ab I can think of is lower CPU/Memory footprint