Now that we have our implementations in place, we can start comparing them. We will begin by implementing some benchmarks to test the performance of both implementations.

Please do not confuse a benchmark with a load test. While the latter is intended to push a system or application to its limits, the former is intended to gather performance statistics for a specified set of conditions.

There are several applications available to perform load tests and benchmarks. For benchmarks, the Apache JMeter project is a good starting point.

It is quite easy to get something running. The documentation says: “For the real stuff, you should only use the command line application and use the GUI to create and test your benchmark.”

We’ll skip a lengthy introduction and tutorial for JMeter because you can find a lot about it within the documentation, and there are lots of tutorials online to help you understand it as well.