Web Performance Test Using Visual Studio – Part III

Ambily.raj
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Performance of an application is very important for a multi-user application. Performance is not only the speed of execution; it includes the load and concurrency aspects. Visual Studio is one of the tools used for Performance Test. Visual Studio Test edition or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate provides the support for test automation.

Introduction

Performance of an application is very important for a multi-user application. Performance is not only the speed of execution; it includes the load and concurrency aspects. Performance Test is an answer for the following questions

  • How can we ensure that our new application will support the expected user load?
  • How to avoid the issues which will arise only in real load conditions?
  • How to find the response time?
  • How to plan the capacity of the servers?


Visual Studio is one of the tools used for Performance Test. Visual Studio Test edition or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate provides the support for test automation.

This will be the third part of a series of articles.

Part I: Web Test and Customization
Part II: Load Test, RIG and Load test terminologies.
Part III: Performance Counters, Load Test Result Analysis.

Performance Counters

Performance counters are predefined or custom counters used to measure the performance of a system. Performance test result analysis fully depends on the performance counters captured as part of the test. So for a better performance result and better analysis, we need to first understand the important counters related to each server.

We can capture the counters either using the Performance Monitor discussed in this article or using the Visual studio itself. For capturing the corresponding server counters, add the servers to the computers section in Load test.


Add Computers for collecting Performance Counters

Right click on Counter Set Mappings under the Run Settings of Load test and select Manage Counter Set option.



 
This will open the Manage Counter Sets window, where we can add the computers. Add the systems and select corresponding counter sets.


When the load test executes, we can observe the counters corresponding to each system in Visual Studio itself.



 

Adding Counters to Performance Monitor

Setting Performance Monitor to capture the counters is discussed in this article. If you use the performance monitor to capture the counters, then we need to ensure to start the custom counter set before the load test start and end the same after the load test completes. Also need to merge the results from various servers and generate the reports.


Important Counters

Depends on the server and application hosted on the same, we have to capture the counters. For example, the counters required for a database server will be different from that of a web server. Also we have generic counters required for every server like the processor utilization or memory utilization, etc. In this section, we will discuss about the Generic counters, important counters required for an application server, counters required for a database server. Here, we will discuss few of the important counters, but not all.

Generic Counters

 
\Processor(*)\%Processor time - This counter measure the processor utilization. Capture this counter from all servers and measure the average utilization, In an Idle situation, processor utilization should be less than 80%.


\Process(*)\Private Bytes - Indicates the memory allocated to this process in terms of bytes. This indicates the memory usage of the process.


\Network Interface\Bytes Received/sec, \Network Interface\Bytes Sent/sec, \Network Interface\Bytes Total/sec - these three counters determines the network usage of the server.
 

ASP.Net web Application Server Counters

 
\.Net CLR Data\ - This counter group contains counters associated with number of pooled connections, number of failed connect attempts and number of connection pools associated with specific process running on the application server.


\.Net CLR LocksAndThreads\ - this counter group contains information on number of physical and logical threads and any contentions occurred.


\.Net CLR Memory\ - this counter collection includes the number of Gen 0, 1 and 2 collections and heap sizes. This determines the garbage collection rates and in turns the memory management in the application.


\.Net Memory Cache4.0\ - this counter group is for understanding the caching implementation in your application.


\ASP.Net Applications\ - this counters determine the overall request processing and application management. How many requests processed, rejected, queued and disconnected, cache hits and misses, errors, authentication failures, Output cache entries and misses, sessions abandoned and active, transactions committed and aborted.


Database Server Counters

 
\Database\ - General database related counters like database cache size, I/O database reads and writes, Pages converted and records converted. SQL Server specific counters are defined in separate counter groups.


\SQLAgent:Jobs\ - this group contains counters to understand the status of the jobs running in SQL Server. These indicate how many jobs are active, failed, queued and successfully executed.


\SQLServer:Locks\ - this counter determines how many dead locks occurred in the application execution.

 

Common Terms

Before discussing about the counters and how to interpret them, we need to look into the various terms associated with a performance test.

Response Time

Most of the performance test is done to understand the response time of an application in a given load. If an application is not completed its performance test, then the response time for an expected user load may not be defined.


Response time is the time taken by a web page or a transaction to respond to the user. 8sec is the standard maximum response time for a web page. If the page is having lot of images or video clips, it may take more time to load. For better usage, we can load the page in progress using Asynchronous calls and Ajax. If the response time is very high, the user experience will be low and the usage of the application may affect it. For decreasing the response time at the same time keeping the rich user interface is one of the challenges.

Throughput

Throughput is the number transactions or inputs handled by the server per second. This indicates how much load or requests the server can handle at once. Depends on the throughput and response time requirements we may plan the clustering of servers.

Resource Utilization

Resource utilization includes the servers’ processor, memory and network utilizations. How much the application utilizing the server resources determine, whether we can go with a single server or need to have multiple servers or not.

These are three major terms or measures we use in performance test. Apart from these measures, we have network time, latency time, request time, test mix, load mix, etc. We will discuss later on the different terms associated with a performance test.

Result Analysis

Now, we have the required counter data and the performance data like response time and throughput. Performance result analysis for different scenarios cannot be explained in one or two documents. Depends on the data we receive as a result of performance test, the analysis will vary.


For example, consider you are getting very high response time with good resource utilization. This simple means, the high response time is not due to any resource issue, it may be due to your SQL part or due to front end code. Look into the SQL counters and determine, whether the particular page is making any database calls which yields lot of reads, writes and CPU cycles. If so, then the issue is with database query or stored procedure. Once, we narrow down the issue to database level, and then we can use the database tools like SQL Execution plan or Database engine tuning advisor to understand the issue and fix the same.

If the issue is with application code, then we need to examine, whether the issue is due to any cache issues, images, threading issues, connection pooling, etc.

Conclusion

We will discuss more on result analysis using some sample scenarios in next article. 

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About the Author

Ambily.raj
Full Name: Ambily KK
Member Level: Silver
Member Status: Member,Microsoft_MVP,MVP
Member Since: 5/18/2010 1:05:25 AM
Country: India
Thanks Ambily K K http://ambilykk.com/
http://ambilykk.com/
I have over 9 years of experience working on Microsoft Technologies. I am carrying the passion on Microsoft technologies specifically on web technologies such as ASP .Net and Ajax. My interests also include Office Open XML, Azure, Visual Studio 2010. Technology adoption and learning is my key strength and technology sharing is my passion.

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Comments or Responses

Posted by: Leelamanohar11 on: 12/22/2011 | Points: 25
Simple & nice post.
Can you add an article with brief description about the Performance Test Result Analysis.
Thanks for your efforts.
Posted by: Kalyan1403 on: 12/15/2012 | Points: 25
Im very new to coded ui automation. can u please suggest hw to prepare framework for one complete application

i have group of test cases hw to link and execute ata time
thanks in advance
Kalyan Santosh


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