JMeter - how to handle very large output xml files for long tests

Question

I want to run JMeter for an extended period of time (6+ hours), to validate the stability of a web application under load.

The problem is that the XML output files for jmeter get to be huge and very slow to parse with XSL.

Is it possible to:

• Send the output to a database (mysql, etc)
• Split the outputs into multiple XML files once they reach a max size

Answer 1

Within Jmeter, neither of your proposals is possible. You could have a third party tool/script split the XML file after the run.

Have you limited the output file to just the data you want? For example, do you need to capture the response data for all passed queries? For my needs, I create two listeners: One for all requests and one for failed requests only. I only write the response data for the failed requests.

Answer 2

I think this problem is resolved in JMeter 3.1.

Add higher values to below parameters in jmeter.properties(apache-jmeter-3.1/bin) files and check your jmeter test.

httpsampler.max_bytes_to_store_per_request: Maximum number of bytes to keep in memory per request

httpsampler.max_buffer_size: Buffer size when reading response sent by the server.

FYI (from JMeter 3.1 Changes), JMeter is now able to handle in terms of metrics responses bigger than 2GB, limit has been increased to 9223372 TB. To handle such big responses, it can also now truncate part of the response to avoid overflooding memory. See httpsampler.max_bytes_to_store_per_request property.

You can refer the 'Handling Big responses' section in JMeter 3.1 Changes