Gatling is an open-source performance testing framework, which uses Scala, Akka and Netty as a technology stack and as its backbone. The first Gatling release was in January 2012. Since then, Gatling has had a couple of major releases almost each year, as well as a pretty extensive popularity growth across the performance engineering community.
Gatling is a command line tool, i.e it has no GUI or Web UI, which implies a certain level of technical knowledge for its users.
- Gatling Works Everywhere
Gatling is written in Scala, which allows you to run it on any system. That’s why you will never hit any trouble by using different local machines and cloud servers to run and create your tests.
2. Create Gatling Tests as Code
For many developers, it is a huge benefit if they can write performance tests as source code, as Gatling enables. This allows us to store tests under version control systems that enhance developers’ collaboration, keep historical changes clear and prevent us from losing the work we have done. Also you can use any popular code IDE application for writing script.
3.Gatling has Detailed Metrics Dashboards Out of the Box
Gatling created detailed metrics dashboard that you can see after tests execution without having to add any additional plugins. The report is stored as an HTML file, which can be easily saved for some future analyses and metrics comparison.
4.Gatling is Powerful!
it’s worth saying that all performance tools should be powerful by the nature of their purpose .But Gatling definitely has an advantage over many other frameworks (like JMeter), because it uses advanced architecture and the Akka toolkit, which is based on the actor model that is distributed and fully asynchronous by design. It uses scala for scripting which a powerfull language.Gatling doesn’t allocate a separate thread for each user. Instead, all multithreading is done via messages between actors (universal primitives of concurrent computation), which allow to simulate a list of users by using just one thread.Gatling handles the load better than JMeter and can help you save CPU and RAM, which will help you simulate a bit more users.
5. Gatling has Capable Assertions
Gatling has an integrated assertions API, which gives you a full arsenal to perform functional assertions. This API allows you to run different types of functional checks along with your performance testing.
6.Gatling Uses Human Readable Tests
Gatling tests are very elegant, because Gatling defines a domain-specific language that allows writing very clear and human readable tests. This is important because it helps teammates work together on the same scenarios without spending time on additional knowledge transfer. Below is the Gatling script:
7.Gatling has Inbuilt Integration with Continuous Integration Pipelines
Gatling performance tool can be fully executed by using the command line, making it compatible with any Continuous Integration platform. You will be doubly happy if you use Jenkins continuous integration service, because you can use the pretty useful Jenkins Gatling plugin, which lets you to keep track performance metrics trends in the main screen of the test build plan.
Gatling Cons:
– Not for beginners – The larger number of prerequisites and high technical skills that are needed make it hard to use for beginner as Scala, requires coding skills.
– Poor level of information during execution time
– Few protocols supported: HTTP, WebSockets, Server-sent events, JMS
– Doesn’t have host monitoring integrations (third-party applications can be used) or you can use the Gatling Frontline, which is the commercial version of the Gatling open source framework.
– No distributed testing – Using the free version, the load distribution (running a higher load from a farm of load generator machines) is not so intuitive like other open source tools.
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Categories: Gatling
