JMeter parameterized tests with large CSV files

Question

I'm using JMeter to run performance tests, but my sample data set is huge.

We want to simulate production-like traffic, and in order to do that, we need to have a large variety of requests replayed from production logs.

In turn, this causes us to have a huge sample dataset. So the questions are:

1. What's the recommended CSV sample size for large input samples?
2. Is CSV Data Config enough to use files that contain 300MB - 500MB or more worth of HTTP request payloads?
3. Can I just increase JVM memory limits?
4. Is this method good enough? Is there a better alternative?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The size of the CSV has no impact on memory usage of JMeter provided you use CSV Data Set.

Just don't use the CSVRead function as per the note in documentation.

By the way I see you flagged question as JMeter 3.2, in case you are using it, you should upgrade to JMeter 4.0 which is the most powerful and accurate version.