Interpreting and evaluating Jmeter output

Question

I am using Jmeter to carry out load and stress tests on a RESTful web service for a university project. I have used JMeter to successfully return results but I am not sure what constitutes an acceptable level of performance. What level of throughput etc. should i be looking to achieve with my web service?

Answer 1

Aim for less than 50us (microsecond) if you can. Use other 'good' sites' response time as your yardstick. Check out google.com and bing.com load times. For more 'heavy' sites see cnn.com or nytimes.com for examples. Depending on how heavy your site is in term of calculation or database reads milliseconds response time are still ok. Be unhappy if it takes more than 300ms because that is an insanely long CPU time these days.