Understanding RESTful Web Service stress test results

Question

I'm trying to stress-test my Spring RESTful Web Service.

I run my Tomcat server on a Intel Core 2 Duo notebook, 4 GB of RAM. I know it's not a real server machine, but i've only this and it's only for study purpose.

For the test, I run JMeter on a remote machine and communication is through a private WLAN with a central wireless router. I prefer to test this from wireless connection because it would be accessed from mobile clients. With JMeter i run a group of 50 threads, starting one thread per second, then after 50 seconds all threads are running. Each thread sends repeatedly an HTTP request to the server, containing a small JSON object to be processed, and sleeping on each iteration for an amount of time equals to the sum of a 100 milliseconds constant delay and a random value of gaussian distribution with standard deviation of 100 milliseconds. I use some JMeter plugins for graphs.

Here are the results:

I can't figure out why mi hits per seconds doesn't pass the 100 threshold (in the graph they are multiplied per 10), beacuse with this configuration it should have been higher than this value (50 thread sending at least three times would generate 150 hit/sec). I don't get any error message from server, and all seems to work well. I've tried even more and more configurations, but i can't get more than 100 hit/sec. Why?

[EDIT] Many time I notice a substantial performance degradation from some point on without any visible cause: no error response messages on client, only ok http response messages, and all seems to work well on the server too, but looking at the reports:

As you can notice, something happens between 01:54 and 02:14: hits per sec decreases, and response time increase, okay it could be a server overload, but what about the cpu decreasing? This is not compatible with the congestion hypothesis.

Answer 1

I want to notice that you've chosen very well which rows to display on Composite Graph. It's enough to make some conclusions:

1. Make note that Hits Per Second perfectly correlates with CPU usage. This means you have "CPU-bound" system, and the maximum performance is mostly limited by CPU. This is very important to remember: server resources spent by Hits, not active users. You may disable your sleep timers at all and still will receive the same 80-90 Hits/s.
2. The maximum level of CPU is somewhere at 80%, so I assume you run Windows OS (Win7?) on your machine. I used to see that it's impossible to achieve 100% CPU utilization on Windows machine, it just does not allow to spend the last 20%. And if you achieved the maximum, then you see your installation's capacity limit. It just has not enough CPU resources to serve more requests. To fight this bottleneck you should either give more CPU (use another server with higher level CPU hardware), or configure OS to let you use up to 100% (I don't know if it is applicable), or optimize your system (code, OS settings) to spend less CPU to serve single request.
3. For the second graph I'd suppose something is downloaded via the router, or something happens on JMeter machine. "Something happens" means some task is running. This may be your friend who just wanted to do some "grep error.log", or some scheduled task is running. To pin this down you should look at the router resources and jmeter machine resources at the degradation situation. There must be a process that swallows CPU/DISK/Network.