Testing / Apache JMeter Interview questions
What is the difference between master-slave distributed testing and running tests locally?
Running a test locally means a single JMeter instance on one machine generates all the load itself, which is limited by that one machine's CPU, memory, and network capacity - a real ceiling on how many virtual users it can realistically simulate.
Master-slave (also called controller-agent) distributed testing coordinates multiple JMeter instances - one master issuing commands and several remote agent machines actually generating load - letting the aggregate load scale beyond what any single machine could produce on its own, with results collected back at the master.
The tradeoff is operational complexity: distributed testing requires provisioning and networking multiple machines, keeping their JMeter versions and Java versions in sync, and accounting for the master's own overhead in aggregating results from every agent, none of which a simple local run needs to worry about.
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