What are Virtual Users in Load Testing

What are Virtual Users in Load Testing

The Virtual Users option when creating a new load test represents Number of Users to hit the application in parallel over a period of time.

This is Useful for identifying application behaviour when x clients connect on the app in parallel over a period of time.

For JMeter Load Testing

Each Virtual User will execute the test plan in its entirety and completely independently of other test user. If you set a higher number of virtual users, these are used to simulate concurrent connections to your server application.

How many concurrent virtual users do I need?

This is not a straightforward process. Our suggestion is to start small, with 1 virtual user, in order to validate the test you've created and check that the response codes for the requests made are the one desired ones.

Then you can increase the number of Virtual Users gradually to 100, 1000 or 10,000 Virtual Users per second. This will help identify potential bottlenecks in your application.

Note: You can slide the Virtual Users setting to visualize the load test you are about to run.