I'm new with website performance testing field and will be using JMeter. After playing with it, I am still having troubles with identifying what to optimize in a website load time?
I'm currently still learning about the load testing - who should I give the performance report to? Developers/Programmers? or Network department? Example of an error I usually get is 502 error or timeouts.
Thanks in advance.
JMeter cannot identify anything, all it does is executing HTTP requests and measuring response times. Ideally it should be you, who takes JMeter raw results, performs analysis and creating the final report highlighting current problems and bottlenecks (and ideally what needs to be done to fix them)
Consider the following checklist:
You load test needs to be realistic, a test which doesn't represent real-life application usage does not make sense. So make sure your JMeter test carefully represents real users in terms of cookies, headers, cache, downloading images, styles and scripts, virtual user groups distribution, etc.
Increase and decrease the load gradually, this way you will be able to correlate such metrics as transactions per second and response time with increasing/decreasing number of users so make sure you apply reasonable ramp-up and ramp-down settings.
Monitor the application under test health. The reason of error may be as simple as lack of hardware resources (CPU, RAM, Disk, etc.). It can be done using i.e. PerfMon JMeter Plugin.
Do the same for JMeter instance(s). JMeter measures response time from "just before sending the request" until "last response byte arrives" so if JMeter is not able to send requests fast enough - you will have high response time without other visible reason.
Website load time is a combination of many factors including the browser rendering time, script execution time, resource download time etc. You can't use JMeter to validate the front end time. You can achieve it using chrome developer tools and other similar tools available for each browser. Refer https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/
JMeter is primarily used for measuring the protocol level performance to ensure that you server can process the heavy workloads when it is subjected to real time stress conditions from several customers. It won't compute the java script execution time or HTML parsing time. Your JMeter script should be written in such a way that it emulates the logic of your java script executions and other presentation logic to form the request inputs and the subsequent requests.
Your question is way too open ended and you might have to start with a mentor who can help you with the whole process and train you.
Also, the mindset for functional testing and performance testing are totally different. Lot of key players in the performance area have suggested to measure the load time as part of the functional testing efforts while the majority of the server side performance is validated by the performance team.
Related
I have to test load testing for 32000 users, duration 15 minutes. And I have run it on command line mode. Threads--300, ramp up--100, loop 1. But after showing some data, it is freeze. So I can't get the full report/html. Even i can't run for 50 users. How can I get rid of this. Please let me know.
From 0 to 2147483647 threads depending on various factors including but not limited to:
Hardware specifications of the machine where you run JMeter
Operating system limitations (if any) of the machine where you run JMeter
JMeter Configuration
The nature of your test (protocol(s) in use, the size of request/response, presence of pre/post processors, assertions and listeners)
Application response time
Phase of the moon
etc.
There is no answer like "on my macbook I can have about 3000 threads" as it varies from test to test, for GET requests returning small amount of data the number will be more, for POST requests uploading huge files and getting huge responses the number will be less.
The approach is the following:
Make sure to follow JMeter Best Practices
Set up monitoring of the machine where you run JMeter (CPU, RAM, Swap usage, etc.), if you don't have a better idea you can go for JMeter PerfMon Plugin
Start your test with 1 user and gradually increase the load at the same time looking into resources consumption
When any of monitored resources consumption starts exceeding reasonable threshold, i.e. 80% of maximum available capacity stop your test and see how many users were online at this stage. This is how many users you can simulate from particular this machine for particular this test.
Another machine or test - repeat from the beginning.
Most probably for 32000 users you will have to go for distributed testing
If your test "hangs" even for smaller amount of users (300 could be simulated even with default JMeter settings and maybe even in GUI mode):
take a look at jmeter.log file
take a thread dump and see what threads are doing
I was used a load of 100 using ultimate thread group for execution in NON GUI Mode .
The Execution takes place around 5 mins. only . After that my test environment got shut down. I am not able to drill down the issues. What could be the reason for server downs. my environment supports for 500 users.
How do you know your environment supports 500 users?
100 threads don't necessarily map to 100 real users, you need to consider a lot of stuff while designing your test, in particular:
Real users don't hammer the server non-stop, they need some time to "think" between operations. So make sure you add Timers between requests and configure them to represent reasonable think times.
Real users use real browsers, real browsers download embedded resources (images, scripts, styles, fonts, etc) but they do it only once, on subsequent requests the resources are being returned from cache and no actual request is being made. Make sure to add HTTP Cache Manager to your Test Plan
You need to add the load gradually, this way you will be able to state what was amount of threads (virtual users) where response time start exceeding acceptable values or errors start occurring. Generate a HTML Reporting Dashboard, look into metrics and correlate them with the increasing load.
Make sure that your application under test has enough headroom to operate in terms of CPU, RAM, Disk space, etc. You can monitor these counters using JMeter PerfMon Plugin.
Check your application logs, most probably they will have some clue to the root cause of the failure. If you're familiar with the programming language your application is written in - using a profiler tool during the load test can tell you the full story regarding what's going on, what are the most resources consuming functions and objects, etc.
I am using JMeter to test my own web application with the HTTP request. The final result seems okay. But I have one question are there any details of testing standard? Because I am writing a report which needs some data as a reference.
For example, something like the connected time and loading speed should lower than XXXXms or sample time should between XX and XX
I didn't find there are any references about this. So is there anyone knows about this which I can be used as reference data
I doubt you will be able to find "references". Normally when people invest into performance testing they have either non-functional requirements to check or they better spend money on performance testing to see if/when/where their system breaks instead of loosing it for every minute of system unexpected downtime.
So if you're developing an internal application for your company users will "have to" wait until it does its job as they don't have any alternative. On the other hand they will loose their valuable time so you will be like "serial programmer John"
If you're running a e-commerce website and it is not responsive enough - users just go to your competitors and never return.
If you still want some reference numbers:
According to a report by Akamai, 49% of respondents expected web pages to load in under 2 seconds, while 30% expect a 1-second response and 18% expected a site to load immediately. 50% of frustrated users will visit another website to accomplish their activity, while finally, 22% will leave and won't return to a website where problems have occurred
Similarly, a Dynatrace survey last year found that 75 percent of all smartphone and tablet users said they would abandon a retailer's mobile site or app if it was buggy, slow or prone to crashes.
See Why Performance Testing Matters - Looking Back at Past Black Friday Failures article for more information.
Feng,
There is no standard acceptance criteria for application performance. Most of the time Product owner takes the decision of acceptable response time, but we as a performance tester should always recommend to keep the response time within 2 seconds.
If you are running the performance testing first time of your application then its good to set the benchmark & baseline of your application based on that you can run your future tests and suggest the recommendation to the development team.
In performance testing, you can set benchmarks for following KPIs
Response time
Throughput
Also, its recommended to share detailed performance report to the stackholders so that they can easily take their decision. JMeter now provides Dashboard Report that has all the critical KPIs and performance related information.
While load/performance testing of API on ELB in AWS using JMeter, I see
AWS cloud watch Latency metric = 10 ms (seems good) and in JMeter's Summary Report Average metric = 3000 ms (seems bad).
The API returns 1MB of JSON data, but I don't understand why there is so much difference in numbers and is this api performance acceptable?
If the SLA said to have 100 ms API response time.
You are looking into different metrics:
Latency: JMeter measures the latency from just before sending the request to just after the first response has been received.
Elapsed time: JMeter measures the elapsed time from just before sending the request to just after the last response has been received.
So Latency is included into response time, it is so-called Time To First Byte and Elapsed Time is the Time to Last Byte. My expectation is that you should be sticking to what JMeter reports so you won't be confused with the metrics coming from different sources, JMeter is at least open source therefore you have the confidence regarding how the metrics are calculated.
If response time of 3 seconds is too high you can start looking into the reasons for this which could be:
Your API server is simply overloaded, check out CPU, RAM, Network, Disk usage using i.e. aforementioned Amazon CloudWatch or JMeter PerfMon Plugin
Your application configuration might not be ready for high loads. The majority of web/application/database servers defaults are suitable for application development and debugging only (same applies to JMeter) so most probably you will need to tune infrastructure.
Your application uses non-optimal algorithms. Use profiler tools to inspect where it spends time, what are the "heaviest" methods, how long database calls last, etc.
Also if your application is behind the ELB JMeter can cache IP address of one of the entry nodes and all your requests will be hitting only one host. To avoid this situation add DNS Cache Manager to your Test Plan.
References:
JMeter Glossary
JMeter Best Practices
The DNS Cache Manager: The Right Way To Test Load Balanced Apps
I want to know that how can I test my website (web-based program) performance with the factors of speed and response time when using MS-SQL Server and ASP.net
Actually I want to know when my users increased to 1,000,000 and more, how the speed and performance changed?
Thank you
There are a number of tools to run load tests against web sites; I like JMeter (http://jmeter.apache.org/) - open source, free, easy to use - but there are lots of others - google "web performance testing" and take your pick.
All those tools allow you to specify a number of concurrent users, wait times between page requests, and then specify one or more user journeys through the site. They will give you a report showing response times as the number of users changes.
You can install the load testing applications on any machine; most have the concept of "controller", and "load agent". The controller orchestrates the load test, while the load agents execute the tests. Generating the equivalent load of 1 million visitors is likely to require significant horse power - you may need to use one of the cloud providers of load testing solutions. Again, Google is your friend here.