What are Samples in Load Testing?

A sample is one request that a virtual user sent during a load test, together with the response it got back. If a test sends 1,000 requests in total, the result shows 1,000 samples. In LoadFocus the Samples tile on the results page is the total number of requests sent to the server during the test.

Why samples matter

Every other number on the results page is calculated from the individual samples, so it helps to know what they hold:

• Traffic: the sample count shows how many requests your server actually received. It grows with the number of virtual users, the test duration and how many requests each iteration makes. A bigger count is not better by itself; it is the amount of work you asked for.
• Errors: each sample either succeeded or failed. The share of failed samples is your error rate, and a rising error rate while load grows is a sign you reached a limit. See errors by type for what the failures mean.
• Response time: each sample records how long the server took to answer. Average and percentile response times are calculated across all samples. See decoding average response times.

Samples in a JMeter test

In a JMeter test, each execution of a sampler is one sample. Samplers you disabled in the JMeter GUI do not run in the cloud either, so they add no samples.

To read the full set of charts and tables built from samples, see analyzing load test results.