An Empirical Study on Web GUI Load Testing and the Hybrid with HTTP Requests

Nowadays, webpages are widely used for service delivery, necessitating load testing to ensure an optimal user experience. This research introduces a JMeter plugin for frontend testing, enabling comprehensive load tests. However, frontend load tests require significant hardware resources to generate substantial traffic. The paper conducts three experiments comparing pure frontend, pure backend, and hybrid load tests. The experiment results indicate that a frontend test case exposes response delays not captured by backend tests. This highlights the cost-effectiveness of hybrid load testing in simulating webpage loads and uncovering frontend user experience issues that might be overlooked by backend tests.