JMeter - setUp Thread Group infinite loop only in CLI mode

I'm trying to use JMeter to make some performance tests on an IBM MQ consumer.

I found a very useful article there: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/integration/blogs/paul-harris1/2022/11/28/testing-mq-with-jmeter .

The article gives a link to a github repository with the example JMeter test plan: https://github.com/ibm-messaging/mqperf/tree/gh-pages/jmeter

I downloaded the test plan and removed all the "receiver" elements as I need the test plan only to produce messages to the MQ queue.

The test plan looks like this:

the "setup Thread Group (Sender Connections)" element creates one connection to the queue manager per JMeter user. It is configured like this:

So I expected it to run only once per test plan execution.

When I run the test plan from GUI, these are the steps executed by the test plan:

The "Create Sender Connections to Queue Manager" is run only once, as expected.

But, when I run my test plan from CLI, using this command:

~/apps/apache-jmeter-5.6/bin$ ./jmeter.sh -n -t ~/my-mq-plan.jmx -e -o mq_reports -l mq_logs.log

I see that jmeter executes indefinitely the "Create Sender Connections to Queue Manager" step:

.

The queue manager finally replies with errors as connections are exhausted. And no message was sent to the queue.

I don't understand why.

• I checked JMeter CLI options, I checked in the JMeter doc what are the differences between GUI execution and CLI execution. I didn't find anything that could help me to fix the issue.

• I tried to disable listeners.

• I found this SO question which looks a little bit like my issue but really a little bit and the accepted answer does not help me anyway: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48165101/jmeter-test-works-differently-from-cli-than-gui-why

• I event tried to click on the "save" button after selecting each element of the test plan, just in case JMeter does not save all elements.

EDIT: other things I already tried

• I closed and reopen the GUI to make sure the file is saved on disk.

• I checked the xml content of the jmx file :

• Everytime I run the the test plan in CLI, I delete the generated files :

rm -Rf mq_reports/ && rm mq_logs.log
./jmeter.sh -n -t /home/derek/MQ-Sender-Only-Plan.jmx -e -o mq_reports -l mq_logs.log

• I changed the -t argument to pass the absolute path of the file (see previous bullet point). I see exactly the same path in the GUI:

• I checked the MQ console. When running with GUI, there's only one connection. When running with CLI, I see more than 200 connections to the queue manager.

What could cause this strange behavior ?

This a bug in the 5.6 release of JMeter : https://github.com/apache/jmeter/issues/6008

Wait for the 5.6.1 release or stick to 5.5.

If you see different behaviour in GUI and non-GUI modes it means that you're running different test plans.

Check jmeter.log file, it has the full path to the .jmx script, the number of threads which are being started for each thread groups, thread termination reason and many more (especially if you increase JMeter logging verbosity to DEBUG level)

So my expectation is that

1. Either you forgot to save your .jmx script
2. Or you're running different script
3. Or you're having previous results in the .jtl file and new results are basically getting appended to it, try adding -f option to your JMeter command line so it would remove the .jtl file instead of adding new metrics to it.