Changes

Version 3.2

Summary

• New and Noteworthy
• Incompatible changes
• Bug fixes
• Improvements
• Non-functional changes
• Known problems and workarounds
• Thanks

New and Noteworthy

IMPORTANT CHANGES

JMeter now requires Java 8. Ensure you use the most up to date version.

JMeter logging has been migrated to SLF4J and Log4j 2. This affects configuration and 3^rd party plugins, see below "Logging changes".

Core improvements

• JMeter now provides a new BackendListener implementation that interfaces InfluxDB.

  

  This implementation sends data using Asynchronous HTTP calls to InfluxDB through its HTTP API and give you the following graphs with annotations:

  

• DNS Cache Manager now has a table to allow static host resolution.

  

• JMS Publisher and Subscriber now allow reconnection on error with pause.

  

  

• Variables in JMS Publisher are now supported for all types of messages. Add the encoding type of the file to parse its content



• XPath Extractor now allows extraction randomly, by index or for all matches.

  

• Response Assertion now allows to work on Request Header, provides a "OR" combination and has a better cell renderer

  

• JMeter now uses Oracle Nashorn Javascript engine instead of Rhino. This provides a faster execution of Javascript.
• HTTP HC4 Implementation now provides preemptive Basic Auth enabled by default
• Embedded resources download in CSS has been improved to avoid useless repetitive parsing to find the resources
• An important work on code quality and code coverage with tests has been done since Sonar has been setup on the project. You can see Sonar report here.

UX improvements

• When running a Test, GUI is now more responsive and less impacting on memory usage thanks to a limitation on the number of Sample Results listeners hold and a rework of the way GUI is updated
• HTTP Request GUI has been simplified and provides more place for parameters and body.

  

• HTTP(S) Test Script Recorder has been simplified and clarified.

  

  

• A replace feature has been added to Search feature to allow replacement in some elements.

  

• View Results Tree now provides a more up to date Browser renderer which requires JavaFX.
• You can now add through a contextual menu think times, this will add think times between samplers and Transaction Controllers of selected node.

  

• You can now apply a naming policy to children of a Transaction Controller. A default policy exists but you can implement your own through org.apache.jmeter.gui.action.TreeNodeNamingPolicy and configuring property naming_policy.impl

  

• Sorting per column has been added to View Results in Table, Summary Report, Aggregate Report and Aggregate Graph elements.

  

Report/Dashboard improvements

• Statistics have been reorganized to clarify report:

  

• It is now possible to customize APDEX thresholds per transaction based on regular expression or sample name. The below example will apply different thresholds for samples sample(\\d+), sampleA and scenarioB than default ones (500 and 1500 for satisfied and tolerated thresholds) declared:

  jmeter.reportgenerator.apdex_satisfied_threshold=500
  jmeter.reportgenerator.apdex_tolerated_threshold=1500
  jmeter.reportgenerator.apdex_per_transaction=sample(\\d+):1000|2000;\
      sampleA:3000|4000;\
      scenarioB:5000|6000
  

Documentation improvements

• PDF Documentations have been migrated and updated to HTML user manual

Incompatible changes

• JMeter requires now at least a Java 8 version to run.
• JMeter logging has been migrated to SLF4J and Log4j 2, this involves changes in the way configuration is done. JMeter now relies on standard Log4j 2 configuration in file log4j2.xml See Logging changes section below for further details.
• The following jars have been removed after migration from LogKit to SLF4J (see Bug 60589):
  • ApacheJMeter_slf4j_logkit.jar
  • avalon-framework-4.1.4.jar
  • avalon-framework-4.1.4.jar
  • commons-logging-1.2.jar
  • excalibur-logger-1.1.jar
  • logkit-2.0.jar
• The commons-httpclient-3.1.jar has been removed after drop of HC3.1 support(see Bug 60727)
• JMeter now sets through -Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/urandom the algorithm for secure random
• Process Sampler now returns error code 500 when an error occurs. It previously returned an empty value.
• In org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.sampler.HTTPHCAbstractImpl two protected static fields (localhost and nonProxyHostSuffixSize) have been renamed to (LOCALHOST and NON_PROXY_HOST_SUFFIX_SIZE) to follow static fields naming convention
• JMeter now uses by default Oracle Nashorn engine instead of Mozilla Rhino for better performances. This should not have an impact unless you use some advanced features. You can revert back to Rhino by settings property javascript.use_rhino=true. You can read this migration guide for more details on Nashorn. See Bug 60672
• Bug 60729 - The Random Variable Config Element now allows minimum==maximum. Previous versions logged an error when minimum==maximum and did not set the configured variable.
• Bug 60730 - The JSON PostProcessor now sets the _ALL variable (assuming Compute concatenation var was checked) even if the JSON path matches only once. Previous versions did not set the _ALL variable in this case.

Removed elements or functions

• SOAP/XML-RPC Request has been removed as part of Bug 60727. Use HTTP Request element as a replacement. See Building a WebService Test Plan
• Bug 60423 - Drop Monitor Results listener
• Drop deprecated class org.apache.jmeter.protocol.system.NativeCommand
• Drop deprecated class org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.config.gui.MultipartUrlConfigGui
• Drop deprecated class org.apache.jmeter.testelement.TestListener
• Drop deprecated class org.apache.jmeter.reporters.FileReporter
• Drop deprecated class org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.modifier.UserSequence
• Drop deprecated class org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.parser.HTMLParseError
• Drop unused methods org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.control.HeaderManager#getSOAPHeader and org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.control.HeaderManager#setSOAPHeader(Object)
• org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.util.Base64Encode has been deprecated, you can use java.util.Base64 as a replacement

Logging changes

JMeter logging has been migrated to SLF4J and Log4j 2. This affects logging configuration and 3^rd party plugins (if they use JMeter logging). The following sections describe what changes need to be made.

Setting the logging level and log file

The default logging level can be changed on the command-line using the -L parameter. Likewise the -l parameter can be used to change the name of the log file. However the log_level properties no longer work.

The default logging levels and file name are defined in the log4j2.xml configuration file in the launch directory (usually JMETER_HOME/bin)

    import org.apache.logging.log4j.core.config.Configurator;
    ⋮
    final String loggerName = te.getClass().getName(); // te being a JMeter class
    Configurator.setAllLevels(loggerName, Level.DEBUG); 
    

Changes to 3^rd party plugin logging

        import org.apache.jorphan.logging.LoggingManager;
        import org.apache.log.Logger;
        ⋮
        private static final Logger log = LoggingManager.getLoggerForClass();
    

        import org.slf4j.Logger;
        import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
        ⋮
        private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(YourClassName.class);
    

Improvements

HTTP Samplers and Test Script Recorder

• Bug 59934 - Fix race-conditions in CssParser. Based on a patch by Jerome Loisel (loisel.jerome at gmail.com)
• Bug 60543 - HTTP Request / Http Request Defaults UX: Move to advanced panel Timeouts, Implementation, Proxy. Implemented by Philippe Mouawad (p.mouawad at ubik-ingenierie.com) and contributed by Ubik Load Pack (support at ubikloadpack.com)
• Bug 60548 - HTTP Request : Allow Upper Panel to be collapsed
• Bug 57242 - HTTP Authorization is not pre-emptively set with HttpClient4
• Bug 60727 - Drop commons-httpclient-3.1 and related elements. Contributed by Ubik Load Pack (support at ubikloadpack.com)
• Bug 60790 - HTTP(S) Test Script Recorder : Improve information on certificate expiration and have better UX for Start/Stop
• Bug 60888 - HttpRequest : Add option to allow retrial of all requests including NON Idempotent HTTP methods
• Bug 60896 - HTTP(S) Test Script Recorder : Improve UX by reducing number of properties on screen

Other samplers

• Bug 60740 - Support variable for all JMS messages (bytes, object, …) and sources (file, folder), based on Pull request #241. Contributed by Maxime Chassagneux (maxime.chassagneux at gmail.com).
• Bug 60585 - JMS Publisher and JMS Subscriber : Allow reconnection on error and pause between errors. Based on Pull request #240 from by Logan Mauzaize (logan.mauzaize at gmail.com) and Maxime Chassagneux (maxime.chassagneux at gmail.com).
• Pull request #259 - Refactored and reformatted SmtpSampler. Contributed by Graham Russell (graham at ham1.co.uk)

Controllers

• Bug 60672 - JavaScript function / IfController : use Nashorn engine by default

Listeners

• Bug 60144 - View Results Tree : Add a more up to date Browser Renderer to replace old Render
• Bug 60542 - View Results Tree : Allow Upper Panel to be collapsed. Contributed by Ubik Load Pack (support at ubikloadpack.com)
• Bug 52962 - Allow sorting by columns for View Results in Table, Summary Report, Aggregate Report and Aggregate Graph. Based on a Pull request #245 by Logan Mauzaize (logan.mauzaize at gmail.com) and Maxime Chassagneux (maxime.chassagneux at gmail.com).
• Bug 60590 - BackendListener : Add Influxdb BackendListenerClient implementation to JMeter. Partly based on Pull request #246 by Logan Mauzaize (logan.mauzaize at gmail.com) and Maxime Chassagneux (maxime.chassagneux at gmail.com).
• Bug 60591 - BackendListener : Add a time boxed sampling. Based on a Pull request #237 by Logan Mauzaize (logan.mauzaize at gmail.com) and Maxime Chassagneux (maxime.chassagneux at gmail.com).
• Bug 60678 - View Results Tree : Text renderer, search should not popup "Text Not Found"
• Bug 60691 - View Results Tree : In Renderers (XPath, JSON Path Tester, RegExp Tester and CSS/JQuery Tester) lower panel is sometimes not visible as upper panel is too big and cannot be resized
• Bug 60687 - Make GUI more responsive when it gets a lot of events.
• Bug 60791 - View Results Tree: Trigger search on Enter key in Search Feature and display red background if no match
• Bug 60822 - ResultCollector does not ensure unique file name entries in files HashMap

Timers, Assertions, Config, Pre- & Post-Processors

• Bug 60154 - User Parameters GUI: allow rows to be moved up & down in the list. Contributed by Murdecai777 (https://github.com/Murdecai777).
• Bug 60507 - Added 'Or' Function into ResponseAssertion. Based on a contribution from 忻隆 (298015902 at qq.com)
• Bug 58943 - Create a Better Think Time experience. Contributed by Ubik Load Pack (support at ubikloadpack.com)
• Bug 60602 - XPath Extractor : Add Match No. to allow extraction randomly, by index or all matches
• Bug 60710 - XPath Extractor : When content on which assertion applies is not XML, in View Results Tree the extractor is marked in Red and named SAXParseException. Contributed by Ubik Load Pack (support at ubikloadpack.com)
• Bug 60712 - Response Assertion : Improve Renderer of Patterns
• Bug 59174 - Add a table with static hosts to the DNS Cache Manager. This enables better virtual hosts testing with HttpClient4.

Functions

• Bug 60883 - Pull request #288 - Add ${__escapeXml()} function. Contributed by Michael Osipov (michaelo at apache.org)

I18N

• Improve translation "save_as" in French. Based on a Pull request #252 by Maxime Chassagneux (maxime.chassagneux at gmail.com).
• Bug 60785 - Improvement of Japanese translation. Patch by Kimono (kimono.outfit.am at gmail.com).

Report / Dashboard

• Bug 60637 - Improve Statistics table design

  

• Bug 60112 - Report / Dashboard : Add ability to customize APDEX thresholds per Transaction name. Contributed by Stephane Leplus (s.leplus at ubik-ingenierie.com)

General

• Bug 58164 - Check if file already exists on ResultCollector listener before starting the loadtest
• Bug 54525 - Search Feature : Enhance it with ability to replace
• Bug 60530 - Add API to create JMeter threads while test is running. Based on a contribution by Logan Mauzaize (logan.mauzaize at gmail.com) and Maxime Chassagneux (maxime.chassagneux at gmail.com).
• Bug 60514 - Ability to apply a naming convention on Children of a Transaction Controller. Contributed by Ubik Load Pack (support at ubikloadpack.com)
• Bug 60711 - Improve Delete button behaviour for Assertions / Header Manager / User Parameters GUIs / Exclude, Include in HTTP(S) Test Script Recorder
• Bug 60593 - Switch to G1 GC algorithm
• Bug 60595 - Add a SplashScreen at the start of JMeter GUI. Contributed by Maxime Chassagneux (maxime.chassagneux at gmail.com).
• Bug 55258 - Drop "Close" icon from toolbar and add "New" to menu. Partly based on contribution from Sanduni Kanishka (https://github.com/SanduniKanishka)
• Bug 59995 - Allow user to change font size with two new menu items and use jmeter.hidpi.scale.factor for scaling fonts. Contributed by Ubik Load Pack (support at ubikloadpack.com)
• Bug 60654 - Validation Feature : Be able to ignore BackendListener. Contributed by Maxime Chassagneux (maxime.chassagneux at gmail.com).
• Bug 60646 - Workbench : Save it by default
• Bug 60684 - Thread Group: Validate ended prematurely by Scheduler with 0 or very short duration. Contributed by Andrew Burton (andrewburtonatwh at gmail.com).
• Bug 60589 - Migrate LogKit to SLF4J - Drop Avalon, LogKit and Excalibur with backward compatibility for 3^rd party modules. Contributed by Woonsan Ko (woonsan at apache.org)
• Bug 60565 - Migrate LogKit to SLF4J - Optimize logging statements. e.g, message format args, throwable args, unnecessary if-enabled-logging in simple ones, etc. Contributed by Woonsan Ko (woonsan at apache.org)
• Bug 60564 - Migrate LogKit to SLF4J - Replace LogKit loggers with SLF4J ones and keep the current LogKit binding solution for backward compatibility with plugins. Contributed by Woonsan Ko (woonsan at apache.org)
• Bug 60664 - Add a UI menu to set log level. Contributed by Woonsan Ko (woonsan at apache.org)
• Pull request #276 - Added some translations for polish locale. Contributed by Bartosz Siewniak (barteksiewniak at gmail.com)
• Bug 60792 - Create a new Help menu item to create a thread dump
• Bug 60813 - JSR223 Test element : Take into account JMeterStopTestNowException, JMeterStopTestException and JMeterStopThreadException
• Bug 60814 - Menu : Add Open Recent menu item to make recent files loading more obvious
• Bug 60815 - Drop "Reset GUI" from menu
• Bug 60886 - Build improvements to better enable builds in environments that are behind a proxy. Partly contributed by Michael Osipov (michaelo at apache.org)

Non-functional changes

• Bug 60415 - Drop support for Java 7.
• Updated to dnsjava-2.1.8.jar (from 2.1.7)
• Updated to groovy 2.4.10 (from 2.4.7)
• Updated to httpcore 4.4.6 (from 4.4.5)
• Updated to httpclient 4.5.3 (from 4.5.2)
• Updated to jodd 3.8.1 (from 3.7.1.jar)
• Updated to jsoup-1.10.2 (from 1.10.1)
• Updated to ph-css 5.0.3 (from 4.1.6)
• Updated to ph-commons 8.6.0 (from 6.2.4)
• Updated to slf4j-api 1.7.25 (from 1.7.21)
• Updated to asm 5.2 (from 5.1)
• Updated to rsyntaxtextarea-2.6.1 (from 2.6.0)
• Updated to commons-net-3.6 (from 3.5)
• Updated to json-smart-2.3 (from 2.2.1)
• Updated to accessors-smart-1.2 (from 1.1)
• Converted the old pdf tutorials to xml.
• Pull request #255 - Utilised Java 8 (and 7) features to tidy up code. Contributed by Graham Russell (graham at ham1.co.uk)
• Bug 59435 - JMeterTestCase no longer supports JUnit3

Bug fixes

HTTP Samplers and Test Script Recorder

• Bug 60531 - HTTP Cookie Manager : changing Implementation does not update Cookie Policy
• Bug 60575 - HTTP GET Requests could have a content-type header without a body.
• Bug 60682 - HTTP Request : Get method may fail on redirect due to Content-Length header being set
• Bug 60643 - HTTP(S) Test Script Recorder doesn't correctly handle restart or start after stop. Contributed by Ubik Load Pack (support at ubikloadpack.com)
• Bug 60652 - HTTP PUT Requests might leak file descriptors.
• Bug 60689 - httpclient4.validate_after_inactivity has no impact leading to usage of potentially stale/closed connections
• Bug 60690 - Default values for "httpclient4.validate_after_inactivity" and "httpclient4.time_to_live" which are equal to each other makes validation useless
• Bug 60758 - HTTP(s) Test Script Recorder : Number request may generate duplicate numbers. Contributed by Ubik Load Pack (support at ubikloadpack.com)
• Bug 56939 - Parameters are not passed with OPTIONS HTTP Request
• Bug 60778 - Http Java Impl does not show Authorization header in SampleResult even if it is sent
• Bug 60837 - GET with body, PUT are not retried even if httpclient4.retrycount is higher than 0
• Bug 60842 - Trim extracted URLs when loading embedded resources using the Lagarto based HTML Parser.
• Bug 60928 - Http Request : Connection Leak when keepalive is used with Embedded Resources

Other Samplers

• Bug 603982 - Guard Exception handler of the JDBCSampler against null messages
• Bug 55652 - JavaSampler silently resets classname if class can not be found

Controllers

Listeners

• Bug 60648 - GraphiteBackendListener can lose some metrics at end of test if test is very short
• Bug 60650 - AbstractBackendListenerClient does not reset UserMetric between runs
• Bug 60759 - View Results Tree : Search feature does not search in URL. Contributed by Ubik Load Pack (support at ubikloadpack.com)
• Bug 60859 - Save Responses to a file : 2 elements with different configuration will overlap

Timers, Assertions, Config, Pre- & Post-Processors

• Bug 60438 - Pull request #235 - Clear old variables before extracting new ones in JSON Extractor. Based on a patch by Qi Chen (qi.chensh at ele.me)
• Bug 60607 - DNS Cache Manager configuration is ignored
• Bug 60729 - The Random Variable Config Element should allow minimum==maximum
• Bug 60730 - The JSON PostProcessor should set the _ALL variable even if the JSON path matches only once.
• Bug 60747 - Response Assertion : Add Request Headers to Field to Test
• Bug 60763 - XMLAssertion should not leak errors to console
• Bug 60797 - TestAction in pause mode can last beyond configured duration of test

Functions

• Bug 60819 - Function __fileToString does not honor the documentation contract when file is not found

I18N

Report / Dashboard

• Bug 60726 - Report / Dashboard : Top 5 errors by samplers must not take into account the series filtering
• Bug 60919 - Report / Dashboard : Latency Vs Request and Response Time Vs Request are wrong if granularity is different from 1000 (1 second)

General

• Bug 60775 - NamePanel ctor calls overrideable method
• Bug 60428 - JMeter Graphite Backend Listener throws exception when test ends and useRegexpForSamplersList is set to true. Based on patch by Liu XP (liu_xp2003 at sina.com)
• Bug 60442 - Fix a typo in build.xml (gavin at 16degrees.com.au)
• Bug 60449 - JMeter Tree : Annoying behaviour when node name is empty
• Bug 60494 - Add sonar analysis task to build
• Bug 60501 - Search Feature : Performance issue when regexp is checked
• Bug 60444 - Intermittent failure of TestHTTPMirrorThread#testSleep(). Contributed by Thomas Schapitz (ts-nospam12 at online.de)
• Bug 60621 - The "report-template" folder is missing from ApacheJMeter_config-3.1.jar in maven central
• Bug 60744 - GUI elements are not cleaned up when reused during load of Test Plan which can lead them to be partially initialized with a previous state for a new Test Element
• Bug 60812 - JMeterThread does not honor contract of JMeterStopTestNowException
• Bug 60857 - SaveService omits XML header if _file_encoding is not defined in saveservice.properties
• Bug 60830 - Timestamps in CSV file could be corrupted due to sharing a SimpleDateFormatter across threads

Thanks

We thank all contributors mentioned in bug and improvement sections above:

• Jerome Loisel (loisel.jerome at gmail.com)
• Liu XP (liu_xp2003 at sina.com)
• Qi Chen (qi.chensh at ele.me)
• (gavin at 16degrees.com.au)
• Thomas Schapitz (ts-nospam12 at online.de)
• Murdecai777 (https://github.com/Murdecai777)
• Logan Mauzaize (logan.mauzaize at gmail.com)
• Maxime Chassagneux (maxime.chassagneux at gmail.com)
• 忻隆 (298015902 at qq.com)
• Ubik Load Pack
• Graham Russell (graham at ham1.co.uk)
• Sanduni Kanishka (https://github.com/SanduniKanishka)
• Andrew Burton (andrewburtonatwh at gmail.com)
• Woonsan Ko (woonsan at apache.org)
• Bartosz Siewniak (barteksiewniak at gmail.com)
• Kimono (kimono.outfit.am at gmail.com)
• Michael Osipov (michaelo at apache.org)
• Stephane Leplus (s.leplus at ubik-ingenierie.com)

We also thank bug reporters who helped us improve JMeter.
For this release we want to give special thanks to the following reporters for the clear reports and tests made after our fixes:

• Tuukka Mustonen (tuukka.mustonen at gmail.com) who gave us a lot of useful feedback which helped resolve Bug 60689 and Bug 60690
• Amar Darisa (amar.darisa at gmail.com) who helped us with his feedback on Bug 60682

Apologies if we have omitted anyone else.

Known problems and workarounds

• View Results Tree may freeze rendering large response particularly if this response has no spaces, see Bug 60816. This is due to an identified Java Bug UI stuck when calling JEditorPane.setText() or JTextArea.setText() with long text without space.

• The Once Only controller behaves correctly under a Thread Group or Loop Controller, but otherwise its behaviour is not consistent (or clearly specified).
• The numbers that appear to the left of the green box are the number of active threads / total number of threads, the total number of threads only applies to a locally run test, otherwise it will show 0 (see Bug 55510).
• Note that under some windows systems you may have this WARNING:

  java.util.prefs.WindowsPreferences
  WARNING: Could not open/create prefs root node Software\JavaSoft\Prefs at root 0
  x80000002. Windows RegCreateKeyEx(…) returned error code 5.
  

  The fix is to run JMeter as Administrator, it will create the registry key for you, then you can restart JMeter as a normal user and you won't have the warning anymore.
• You may encounter the following error:

  java.security.cert.CertificateException: Certificates does not conform to algorithm constraints

  if you run a HTTPS request on a web site with a SSL certificate (itself or one of SSL certificates in its chain of trust) with a signature algorithm using MD2 (like md2WithRSAEncryption) or with a SSL certificate with a size lower than 1024 bits. This error is related to increased security in Java 8+.
  To allow you to perform your HTTPS request, you can downgrade the security of your Java installation by editing the Java jdk.certpath.disabledAlgorithms property. Remove the MD2 value or the constraint on size, depending on your case.
  This property is in this file:

  JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/java.security

  See Bug 56357 for details.
• Under Mac OSX Aggregate Graph will show wrong values due to mirroring effect on numbers. This is due to a known Java bug, see Bug JDK-8065373 The fix is to use JDK8_u45 or later.
• View Results Tree may fail to display some HTML code under HTML renderer, see Bug 54586. This is due to a known Java bug which fails to parse "px" units in row/col attributes. See Bug JDK-8031109 The fix is to use JDK9 b65 or later (but be aware that Java 9 is not certified yet for JMeter).
• JTable selection with keyboard (SHIFT + up/down) is totally unusable with JAVA 7 on Mac OSX. This is due to a known Java bug JDK-8025126 The fix is to use JDK 8 b132 or later.