If I want to stress test a 'classic' client-server (desktop app <-> LAN <-> database server) Windows Forms desktop application to see how it performs when many concurrent PC users are using it, how should I go about it? I want to simulate many PC users concurrently going through a work flow, to see if it all stands up and at what point the system degrades unacceptably. I've looked at many test tools but they all seems to be skewed toward testing functionality or web app performance, which is quite different.
Clearly having many actual people on actual PCs is not practical, and lots of virtual machines on a few PCs is not representative either. 'Cloud' computing (EC2, Azure etc) looks promising but the documentation and pricing information all seems to be skewed towards mobile apps or web servers, again not the same (but that could just be presentation so I remain open to the idea). I need to be able to virtualise a small LAN of many client machines running the application and a database server.
Can anyone suggest how to do this, or recommend something?
TIA
IMHO the real question is - do you really need to do performance testing in your case? Consider this - where is your business and functional logic?
Performance testing of Desktop applications is oxymoron by itself. Desktop application is made to be used by one person at a time. So if getting a response takes 5 seconds, it will take (pretty much) 5 seconds no matter how many users are clicking the button. The only real thing close to your backend is the DB and they by design support serious asynchronous load. In case this is not enough - just make a cluster.
Related
I am trying to connect to an MSTR intelligent server in Seattle from MSTR Developer running on my laptop connected in Bangalore. It takes an average of 10+ seconds for any action I do on the developer, like, login or open folders or open a report or anything. It is almost impractical to do any report development this way (not to mention the frustration).
When my colleague connects to the same instance/project from Seattle he doesn’t face any delays. So I figure that this is a network issue and doesn’t have much to do with the metadata or indexes. The network response time to the box is 30ms and 300ms average from Seattle and Bangalore respectively. I found online that 280ms is average response time from India to US. Accessing the reports and projects via the web interface is smooth though.
Have you ever experienced a situation like this before? Can the network delays cause that much trouble on MicroStrategy? Please help…
PS: This question is not quite a fit for SO. But I guess that MSTR
developers face this problem normally and may be they know a fix.
Hence posting this here rather than SU or somewhere else.
This is a pretty common problem, in my experience. I believe that MicroStrategy's network traffic is XML based, so network bandwidth as well as latency is an issue.
Usually, the web server is more responsive because:
It is performing "simpler" tasks that Developer
The network-intensive traffic is between I-Server and web server, so if they're colocated, performance will be reasonable.
I'm afraid I've never come across an effective solution to this issue. Having a "jump server" in the same data centre as the MSTR servers, with the Developer software installed, is usually the most tolerable solution (provided Remote Desktop isn't too laggy).
Same solution here : we have developpers VMs on a host in the same datacenter as the server, and we remote desktop them. From there, we use Developper/object manager, etc
You can still do 90% of the tasks in web.
Background
I am a developer that works for a health care organization. We build a variety of business apps that a majority of them contain PHI (Patient Health Information). We work on laptops in-house and occasionally have the option to work from home. Something we are discussing though is how do we handle the data stored on our laptops when we are working out of the office.
Although we have passwords and our laptops are encrypted that still doesn't seem like enough to us to protect data. What I mean by that is this. We are a small five person team. When we are working on a task we all work locally on our own databases, on our laptops. When the change is done we commit to svn and publish to a test server. Our concern is my local database is a copy of production sometimes so I can test against real data. That local database could contain thousands of records of PHI. This is obviously a major concern to us when we takes our laptops out of our building because if I have my laptop stolen, I would be putting thousands of patients health information at risk. Not something we want to do.
My Question
How do developers work as a best practice in regards to patient data safety. Or even if it was financial? Either way, how do people work with patient/customer data locally?
Is it fair to say that sometimes you just don't have the ability to connect in to a database behind a firewall or is that just negligence? Even if I keep the database internal I still have project code on my laptop. Is that bad too?
• Should I have fake data?
• Should all data be on an internal machine that you connect to?
• Should I only connect in to a machine that is internal?
I can’t imagine that is what people do all the time.
We are discussing this as a team and would love to hear your feedback in regards to "how do you or anyone work as a remote developer".
Thanks
My experience are mostly in developing web applications and we do a lot of audit trails there. Literally every table is audited. I believe this is because user transactions are centralized to a server and they share the same table so it is important who did what.
But now I am assigned to a project developing a standalone application (specifically a mobile application with occasional server transactions). Some are suggesting to add Audit logging but I am not sure what is the norm for standalone applications. For those who have experiences, kindly share if you think it is mandatory or not. I'm leaning towards NO (that it is not that important) because it will only increase resource consumption (and mobile limited). It may affect performance, stability and usability.
Well for the app itself it may not be so important, however having automated error logs can be very useful when you faced with an angry customer(s) and need to quickly debug the app. You can even have a special 'debug mode' to collect more info.
You should also log your server transactions, adding an extra query in the request won't really affect performance.
Other than the possible lag issues, has anyone tried this? What are the pros or cons associated with this?
A lot of times for me it's the limitations of the remote desktop connection, be it VNC or RDP or whatever. For examples:
My workstation has two monitors. Remotely viewing my workstation reduces it to one.
Lag is tolerable in the IDE, but not with anything image-heavy. Everything from photoshopping to web browsing is done locally, not on the remote machine.
Adding to #2, when splitting up tasks between the local and remote machine, there's that extra layer of getting the two to play nice together that adds just a little bit of overhead per task, which adds up to a lot overall. Something as simple as saving a file from the web browser and opening it in the IDE takes more steps.
(I may think of more and add them later.)
All in all, it's fine if the setup can be adjusted properly. In my experience, the companies I've worked for have defined their remote connection capabilities by the needs of someone other than the software developers, and thus leave us with little pet peeves that make the process just slightly more difficult than it needs to be.
Here is my take on it from my experiences
PROS: Single dev environment, only need to license one set of tools (if applicable)
CONS: The lag got the best of me. Typing to only have it show up 1 - 3 seconds later...sometimes, other times works great. In VS, the popup notifications sometimes take forever to display as well. Other cons would include if you have to share your desktop with another employee and possible moving files to/from the dev machine as RDP does not natively allow you to drag/drop files.
same as other posters - lag when using tools that affect screen painting for vstudio (resharper,coderush) is a real problem - some stuff involving the mouse (dragging grid columns) is very difficult to use
I'd add that about every 10-15 times when I go to log back in on the physical workstation at work, it takes the stupid thing about 2 minutes to finally succeed in refreshing the displays
In an electric company where I was hired temporarily, we have to implement an upgrade of the billing and payments system ( the current system is a dbaseIII system). The company's programmer and I have decided to use VB.Net and MySQL.
The company served several towns and have billing and payments centers in selected towns. Every billing period, the meter readers would read the readings for every electric meters and then write the readings in the sheet. Every 5 pm, an employee from the centers would collect the sheets and then travel to the main center where the readings are encoded.
The billings are printed in the main center, and then distributed to the branches.
During discussions with General Manager and heads of the company, the two of us are tasked to take advantage of the internet because those towns where the centers are located have internet connectivity, and for those none, we can use the mobile internet.
The new system will allow users to enter the readings, and then send the data to the main server in the main branch. They also have the ability to download and print the billings.
Our problem now is what type of system we have to implement. Should it be web based or a desktop application that will connect to our database server through vpn.
If this is a fixed price project, and the client will accept either web or desktop, go with desktop over VPN. You'll save A TON of time, and have something that is more responsive (from a user perspective).
However, if you think the client will eventually need to use the product on mobile devices or the web, you're shooting yourself in the foot by going winforms.
Having had some experience with using a thick client through VPN, I'd say go with some kind of web app.
If done wrong, a thick client can become really painful to use through a VPN because of data churning. A web app concentrates all of that on the server, which makes it much better from that point of view.
Other benefits:
no deployment hassle
no direct access to the database from the user machine.
Evidently it also depends on your skills, and on how much time/budget you have...
I do not know the situation of the client... but what about giving them the best of both worlds? Considering it sounds like you will be programming on a windows based system, and have deployment access to windows server based hardware, why not either build a Silverlight application, or build a WPF application that's hosted in an IE window? That could give you the best of both worlds?
I think that the answer depends on the type / frequency of database queries you need to make. Querying a DB from a thick client through VPN can be SLOOOOOWWWWWW. In a web app, the application logic runs close to the DB, maybe even on the same machine, so DB queries are fast. The downside is that UI can be slower. But it is probably easier to design a responsive web-based UI than make VPN fast.
what instrument your bill collector will use ?
1>Laptop with Mobile InetConnection
2>Or specialized hand held tool that read the bill and send to Service center ?
1> If it is Laptop then you can create website where only authorized person can loggin and then he can insert a database. You can use HTTPs for better security.