HTTP Connections

[Roger Abelenda <ra...@gmail.com>]

Hello,

From JMeter 4 to 5 default behavior for HTTP connection handling changed from connection reuse between thread iterations to connection reset. On 5.2 “same user on each iteration” was implemented and marked as default, changing back the decision of reseting connections on each iteration.

Do you have any particular reason for preferring one over the other as default setting?

On one hand resetting connections allows for better emulation of load considering each thread iteration as a different user, which in general sounds like it would be the way most of users would use threads and iterations: threads as a way to cap the max amount of concurrent users, and iterations/duration as a way to just generate load for a given number of requests or time.

On the other hand resetting connections could easily lead to port and/or file descriptiors exhaustion, which would require usual OS tuning, and in consequence, harder to use for general users that just want to generate some load and are not that concerned with doing accurate emulation (connections and disconnections).

Complementing all of this, default settings of Cookie Manager, Cache Manager & Auth Manager do not reset state by default between iterations, which is prone for new users to face issues due to test flow being affected by previous iterations executions. If JMeter users actually want to emulate a user doing same flow over and over again, maybe a more explicit way of doing it would be using one of the loop controllers (for, while, etc), and by default makes sense to consider thread group iterations as “different users”.

What do you think? Any comments would be greatly appreciated?

If this kind of questions would be more fit for users mailing list than to dev mailing list, let me know and I will move it there.

Regards