I think that to be able to stress the target system to its maximum, I will need to execute on more than one client system as the overhead of a large number of threads seems to affect the client system and skews the results. That is my observation, which I have tried to validate, restarting the system and executing another test. As I continue to execute tests, I notice the response times degrade. I only notice this will a large number of threads (50). I am running my client on a home network (100Mb), cable modem and executing against a system in a remote location.
I have seen this discussed before. I also am aware of third party performance testing tools that collect the results to the master from the slaves after the test has completed. What I wanted to do is to start a thread on approaches to this and also whether it would be a desired extension to Jmeter that would allow the merging of results from the slave systems, after the test has been completed. It seems to me that this is not possible now and is only supported real time or in "batches". Perhaps the batch size can be configured such that all the results are sent upon completion of the test. It seems to me an approach like this is desirable to relieve the network of the overhead of sending the results to the master during the test. So one approach that I saw was to merge the results based on timestamps in the results file. I am guessing that this is a simple matter if the results are in CSV format, but somewhat more complex in XML format. I like that the XML format because of the jmeter extras reporting that uses xslt to transform the xml results to HTML. Woody
