Best tool to record CPU and memory usage with Grinder?

Question

I am using grinder in order to generate reports for the performance tests for my application. But I noticed that it does not generate any report on CPU and memory usage. On further investigation, I found that Grinder does not provide this information. Now, my question is, is there any tool that can be hooked up with grinder, to record the CPU and memory usage details?

Answer 1

As you have discovered, this is not supported directly in The Grinder itself. You will need to use a collection of tools to accomplish this.

I use a combination of Quickstatd, Graphite, and Grinder to Graphite to get all my results in the same place where I can see them. If you need to support Windows, you can probably use collectd (with ssc-serv and the Graphite plugin) instead of Quickstatd, which is based on bash scripts.

You can also pull in server side metrics (like DB lookups per second, etc.) with tools like jmxtrans, statsd, and metrics.

Having all that information in the same place is really powerful, and can give you some good insights.

Answer 2

If you grind a Java server, you can get data via JMX from OperatingSystemMXBean and MemoryMXBean.

Then add the data to a Grinder user Statistic and the data will end up in the -data.log

grinder.statistics.registerDataLogExpression("Load", "userDouble0")

..

grinder.statistics.forCurrentTest.setDouble("userDouble0", systemLoadAverage)

the -data.log can directly be fed into Gnuplot

gnuplot> plot 'client-0-data.log' using 2:7 title "System Load"