Jmeter: How to set up the stepping thread group?

Question

How to set up the stepping thread group? If my application gives average response time as 2sec for 100VU by using "ThreadGroup".

Answer 1

Actually, it depends of your performance test goals. Stepping Thread Group won't allow parameters smaller than 1 second. You have to deal with this limitation.

According to JMeter documentation:

Ramp-up needs to be long enough to avoid too large a work-load at the start of a test, and short enough that the last threads start running before the first ones finish (unless one wants that to happen).

Defining the ramp-up time is a very important step of your performance test. In your case, I recommend start with 1 thread per second using these parameters:

This group will start 100 threads;
First, wait for 0 seconds;
Then start 1 threads;
Next, add 1 threads every 1 seconds using ramp-up 0 seconds,
Then hold the load for 900 seconds.

You can choose to stop all threads at once then. It is up to you.

Why am I suggesting to run a test for almost 20 minutes? Because you are interested in the performance running with 100 threads and you want to maximize the number of samples with such load level. On the suggested setup, you'll have approximately 90% of your test time running with the ideal number of threads.

Once you have those numbers, you can experiment by starting more than 1 thread per second and decrease the overall ramp-up time. Always look at the resource usage (e.g. CPU utilization, memory available, etc.) to understand the system limits.