Changes

Version 5.3

Summary

• New and Noteworthy
• Incompatible changes
• Bug fixes
• Improvements
• Non-functional changes
• Known problems and workarounds
• Thanks

New and Noteworthy

This release is a minor bugfix release. Please see the Changes history page to view the last release notes of version 5.2.1.

UX improvements

Added Darklaf look and feel that improves several components.

Tree indentation level is easier to follow:

New look and feel themes. Light: IntellJ, Solarized Light, HighContrast Light. Dark: OneDark, Solarized Dark, HighContrast Dark.

When an element in tree is disabled, all its descendants are shown in gray. For instance, While Contoller is disabled in the following tree, so its children are gray. It is purely a UI change, and the behavior is not altered.

Tree context menu is shown even in case the node selection is changed. Previously the popup did disappear and it was required to select a node first and only then launch popup.

Look and feel can now be updated without a restart

Use CTRL + ALT + wheel for zooming fonts. Previous shortcut was CTRL + SHIFT + wheel, however, it conflicted with horizontal scrolling.

In-app zoom is more consistent (e.g. sometimes not all the labels or even panels were scaled). For instance: log viewer, JSR223 code editor were not previously scaled with zoom-in/out feature

Tree context menu is shown for the full row, not for the label only

Undo and redo support for editable fields. Keystrokes are CTRL + Z / CTRL + SHIFT + Z, or CMD + Z/ CMD + SHIFT + Z depending on the operating system. Undo is implemented on a field level basis (each fields has its own history), and the history is invalidated when tree selection changes.

Mark the currently selected language in the options menu.

Mark the currently selected log level in the options menu.

Incompatible changes

• Default value of httpclient4.time_to_live has been modified from 2000 to 60000, this means HTTP connections will live longer than before. This has impact on connection creation and SSL handshake, see Bug 64289

Improvements

HTTP Samplers and Test Script Recorder

• Bug 64160 - Test HTTP/S Test Script Recorder: Name transaction controller/ simple controller using prefix without "-XXXX" suffix
• Bug 64289 - Make httpclient4.time_to_live to 60000 to be closer to typical browser behavior

Other samplers

• Bug 64288 - JUnit Request: Improve UX

Controllers

• Bug 64277 - ForEach Controller: Improve UX
• Bug 64280 - If Controller: Improve UX
• Bug 64282 - Throughput Controller: Improve UX
• Bug 64287 - WhileController: Improve UX

Listeners

• Bug 64150 - View Results Tree: Allow editing of response data in testers
• Bug 63822 - View Results Tree: Keep position of split pane while switching renderer mode

Timers, Assertions, Config, Pre- & Post-Processors

• Bug 64091 - Precise Throughput Timer schedule generation is improved significantly (e.g. 2 seconds for 10M samples)
• Bug 64281 - Counter Config: Improve UX
• Bug 64283 - XPath2 Extractor: Improve UX

Functions

• Bug 64070 - _timeshift function does not work with offset formatters
• Bug 64275 - Function Helper Dialog: Improve UX

I18N

• Bug 64102 - Add Chinese translation for Tools menu. Contributed by Liu XP (liu_xp2003 at sina.com)

Report / Dashboard

• Bug 64380 - Add a 'Median' field to the dashboard and make the response time percentile fields support floating-point numbers. Contributed by Keith Mo(https://github.com/keithmork)
• Bug 64378 - HTML report generation should not fail if a plugin has registered a graph and is not more present in classpath, issue a warning instead

General

• Bug 63458 - Pull request #551 - Add new template "Functional Testing Test Plan [01]". Contributed by Sebastian Boga (sebastian.boga at endava.com)
• Bug 64119 - Use first renderer from view.results.tree.renderers_order property as default in View Results Tree
• Bug 64148 - Use gray icons for disabled elements in the tree, display subtree as gray
• Bug 64198 - Allow spaces in ${...} expressions around functions.
• Bug 64276 - Search popup: Improve UX
• Pull request #573 - Improve the startup time: skip test plan UI initialization

Non-functional changes

• Build system upgraded from Gradle to 6.3 (from 6.1), Java 14 can be used now for the build
• Bug 63963 - Pull request #546 - Updated jackson to 2.10.3 (from 2.9.10)
• Bug 64120 - Updated jsoup to 1.13.1 (from 1.12.1)
• Bug 63809 - Updated commons-dbcp2 to 2.7.0 (from 2.5.0)
• Updated Apache ActiveMQ to 5.15.11 (from 5.15.8)
• Updated bouncycastle to 1.64 (from 1.60)
• Updated asm to 7.3.1 (from 7.1)
• Updated Apache commons-codec to 1.14 (from 1.13)
• Updated Apache commons-pool to 2.8.0 (from 2.7.0)
• Updated equalsverifier to 3.1.9 (from 3.1.12)
• Updated Apache Groovy to 2.4.18 (from 2.4.16)
• Updated hsqldb to 2.5.0 (from 2.4.1)
• Updated hamcrest to 2.2 (from 2.1)
• Updated Apache httpclient and httpmime to 4.5.12 (from 4.5.10)
• Updated Apache httpcore and httpcore-nio to 4.4.13 (from 4.4.12)
• Updated Apache Tika to 1.23 (from 1.22)
• Updated jmespath to 0.5.0 (from 0.3.0)
• Updated Apache log4j to 2.13.1 (from 2.12.1)
• Updated junit4 to 4.13 (from 4.12)
• Updated junit5 to 5.6.0 (from 5.5.1)
• Updated slf4j to 1.7.30 (from 1.7.28)
• Updated ph-commons to 9.4.1 (from 9.3.7)
• Updated ph-css to 6.2.2 (from 6.2.0)
• Updated rsyntaxtextarea to 3.1.0 (from 3.0.4)
• Updated rhino to 1.7.12 (from 1.7.11)
• Updated SaxonHE to 9.9.1-7 (from 9.9.1-5)
• Updated cglib to 3.2.12 (from 3.2.9)
• Updated commons-lang3 to 3.10 (from 3.9)
• Updated freemarker to 2.3.30 (from 2.3.29)
• Updated hamcrest-date to 2.0.7 (from 2.0.4)
• Updated equalsverifier to 3.1.13 (from 3.1.12)
• Updated xstream to 1.4.11.1 (from 1.4.11)
• Pull request #559 - Add a note to the source of TrustAllSSLSocketFactory, that it is not secure to trust everyone. Based on a PR from YYTVicky (yytvicky at github)

Bug fixes

HTTP Samplers and Test Script Recorder

Other Samplers

Controllers

Listeners

Timers, Assertions, Config, Pre- & Post-Processors

• Bug 64091 - Precise Throughput Timer might produce less samples when low test duration is used
• Bug 64142 - Presence of DebugPostProcessor in Test plan breaks ActiveThread Over time in report due to missing information
• Bug 64196 - Recurse into sub samplers more deeply when checking assertions
• Bug 64196 - Recurse into sampleResults for AbstractScopedTestElement#getSampleList
• Bug 64381 - PreciseThroughputTimer: On termination, log message contains negative value

Functions

I18N

Report / Dashboard

• Bug 64059 - Response Time Percentiles Over Time, unable to change the percentiles

Documentation

• Pull request #547 - Correct Log level documentation. Contributed by jmetertea
• Pull request #548 - Correct typos in documentation. Contributed by jmetertea
• Bug 64022 - Correct Chinese translation for "Ignore Sub-Controller blocks". Provided by yangxiaofei77 (yangxiaofei77 at gmail.com)
• Pull request #552 - Fix client.rmi.localport port allocation description. Contributed by anant-93
• Pull request #543 - Clarify documentation of __StringToFile function regarding default value of Append to file? parameter. Contributed by Ori Marko
• Bug 64302 - Correct links to JMeter API in printable docs and BeanShell best practices and to JavaFX implementation website in all docs. Reported by 2477441814 (2477441814 at qq.com)

General

• Bug 63945 - NPE when opening a file after file system change
• Bug 64034 - Shell scripts fail if space in JAVA_HOME path. Contributed by ray7219 (ray7219 at hotmail.com)
• Bug 63856 - Set connectTime on parent samples when using a transaction controller
• Bug 64227 - Error when loading Templates on Windows
• TestPlan UI: skip adding the entry to the classpath if the user clicks cancel

Thanks

We thank all contributors mentioned in bug and improvement sections above:

• Stefan Seide (stefan at trilobyte-se.de)
• jmetertea
• ray7219
• Sebastian Boga (sebastian.boga at endava.com)
• Liu XP (liu_xp2003 at sina.com)
• anant-93 (https://github.com/anant-93)
• Ori Marko (orimarko at gmail.com)
• Keith Mo(https://github.com/keithmork)

We also thank bug reporters who helped us improve JMeter.

• Michael McDermott (mcdermott.michaelj at gmail.com)
• yangxiaofei77 (yangxiaofei77 at gmail.com)
• Markus Wolf (wolfm at t-systems.com)
• Pierre Astruc (pierre.astruc at evertest.com)
• YYTVicky (yytvicky at github)
• 2477441814 at qq.com

Apologies if we have omitted anyone else.

Known problems and workarounds

• The Once Only controller behaves correctly under a Thread Group or Loop Controller, but otherwise its behaviour is not consistent (or clearly specified).
• The numbers that appear to the left of the green box are the number of active threads / total number of threads, the total number of threads only applies to a locally run test, otherwise it will show 0 (see Bug 55510).
• Note that under some windows systems you may have this WARNING:

  java.util.prefs.WindowsPreferences
  WARNING: Could not open/create prefs root node Software\JavaSoft\Prefs at root 0
  x80000002. Windows RegCreateKeyEx(…) returned error code 5.
  

  The fix is to run JMeter as Administrator, it will create the registry key for you, then you can restart JMeter as a normal user and you won't have the warning anymore.
• You may encounter the following error:

  java.security.cert.CertificateException: Certificates does not conform to algorithm constraints

  if you run a HTTPS request on a web site with a SSL certificate (itself or one of SSL certificates in its chain of trust) with a signature algorithm using MD2 (like md2WithRSAEncryption) or with a SSL certificate with a size lower than 1024 bits. This error is related to increased security in Java 8+.
  To allow you to perform your HTTPS request, you can downgrade the security of your Java installation by editing the Java jdk.certpath.disabledAlgorithms property. Remove the MD2 value or the constraint on size, depending on your case.
  This property is in this file:

  JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/java.security

  See Bug 56357 for details.
• Under Mac OSX Aggregate Graph will show wrong values due to mirroring effect on numbers. This is due to a known Java bug, see Bug JDK-8065373 The fix is to use JDK8_u45 or later.
• View Results Tree may fail to display some HTML code under HTML renderer, see Bug 54586. This is due to a known Java bug which fails to parse "px" units in row/col attributes. See Bug JDK-8031109 The fix is to use JDK9 b65 or later.
• JTable selection with keyboard (SHIFT + up/down) is totally unusable with Java 7 on Mac OSX. This is due to a known Java bug JDK-8025126 The fix is to use JDK 8 b132 or later.
• Since Java 11 the JavaScript implementation Nashorn has been deprecated. Java will emit the following deprecation warnings, if you are using JavaScript based on Nashorn.

  Warning: Nashorn engine is planned to be removed from a future JDK release
  

  To silence these warnings, add -Dnashorn.args=--no-deprecation-warning to your Java arguments. That can be achieved by setting the enviroment variable JVM_ARGS

  export JVM_ARGS="-Dnashorn.args=--no-deprecation-warning"