Gatling Pros&Cons

Among all the performance test tools, why do we use Gatling?. Let's take a look.

In a nutshell, Gatling has been a part of load-testing solutions for years. It’s performance efficient and cross-platform capabilities got many eyes' attention.

Gatling uses Scala language for writing tests. It’s immediately catching developer’s eyes while load testing their applications and projects.

Developers wants to code, don’t they? Gatling closes this gap between developers and testers. Both can use this tool simply and get familiar with it. This is one of the Gatling’s biggest advantage, providing this kind of adaptation.

Gatling is an open source load-testing tool, You can write your scripts using Scala language or you can simply convert your .Har dump from your browser and convert to Scala language. It can simulate thousands of users concurrently, and it has a basic reporting feature that allows you to take an additional look to test results.

Also Gatling provide you a GUI for recording your traffic and converting your .Har files to Scala script.

Gatling Pros

📗Detailed Reporting

After running your tests Gatling shows you a pretty detailed and colorful report that you can check connection times, response times, concurrent users etc.

📗Load Test As Code

Gatling uses Scala language which is human readable DSL, This benefits for developers they can easy adapt the language.

📗CI/CD Friendly

Any Gatling project that built using Maven or Gradle can easily integrate with CI/CD pipelines out of the box. This is very advantageous compared to other similar tools.

📗Taurus, NewRelic etc. APM Integration

Performance testing means nothing without using any performance monitoring tools a.k.a APM’s. Gatling provides smooth integration with realtime tracking tools.

📗Powerful

Gatling is really powerful tool, Uses Netty and Akka toolkit. While JMeter synchronous and slow, Gatling is asynchronous by its design. Gatling doesn’t allocating separate threads for each users. Which helps to simulate users by using one thread.

📗Integrated API Assertions

Gatling’s integrated API assertions helps you to run different functional checks with your performance tests.

Gatling Cons

📕Distributed Gatling Tests

Gatling Frontline helps you to scale your tests but it’s pricy. So if you want to scale with your tests with open sourced Gatling it’s not easy. While JMeter is easy to distribute your load tests, Gatling isn’t.

To distribute your Gatling tests you can create bash scripts for handling executors or you can easily distribute your tests using Loadium.

📕Poor Information During Execution

Gatling doesn’t provide much information during executing test, Instead of that it shows you a detailed report when you finish. But sometimes you need to see real-time data. This is why we gladly like to mention that Gatling is supported by Loadium, which allows you to monitor your Gatling tests easily.

📕Protocols Support

Gatling much more efficient than similar tools when it comes to threads and connections handling. However, Gatling supports much less protocols. Gatling only supports HTTP, Websocket, Serer-sent events and JMS.

In conclusion, Gatling is a really efficient tool for some protocols. If you need to use APM’s and CI/CD integrations Gatling is the best choice for you. Also keep in mind you can make pro from cons using Loadium! :)

Happy load testing!