Comparative Load Testing of Laravel Academic Information System using JMeter and Locust

Abstract

Academic information systems require performance evaluation to determine how responsiveness changes under concurrent access. This study compares measurements obtained using Apache JMeter and Locust for a Laravel-based academic information system testbed under equivalent authenticated workloads. Experiments involved 10, 50, and 100 virtual users, with three replications per tool and load level, yielding 18 runs. Each virtual user authenticated once using a randomly selected student account and subsequently accessed Dashboard, KRS, Nilai, and KHS services. The workload used an approximately 10-second ramp-up, a 300-second duration, and a 1–5-second think time. Response time, percentile latency, throughput, error rate, and between-run variability were analyzed. At 100 virtual users, mean response time reached 1,205.33 ms for JMeter and 1,745.74 ms for Locust, while mean P95 reached 1,343.33 ms and 2,833.33 ms, respectively. Between 50 and 100 virtual users, throughput increased from 15.507 to 23.445 requests/s for JMeter and from 15.444 to 19.934 requests/s for Locust, indicating diminishing gains relative to the increase in concurrency. All runs recorded a 0% error rate, although responsiveness deteriorated substantially at the highest tested load. Locust exhibited greater between-run variability at 100 virtual users. The study contributes a controlled comparison of authenticated academic workloads combining endpoint-level analysis, percentile latency, and repeated measurements. These findings characterize the tested environment and do not establish production capacity, identify a specific server-side bottleneck, or demonstrate universal tool superiority.