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Hello World: Rational Performance Tester

Get to the bottom of application performance issues

Dennis Schultz (dennis.schultz@us.ibm.com), Marketing Engineer, EMC

Dennis Schultz joined Rational in 1995 as a technical sales engineer. For eight years, he worked closely with numerous clients, implementing Rational solutions in their projects. Dennis helped deploy solutions for software configuration management, change management, requirements management, and test management and implementation. Since 2003, Dennis has been a Technical Marketing Engineer for IBM Rational software. Dennis holds a B.S. in computer engineering from Iowa State University. He is based in St. Louis, Missouri, and fills his non-work time with his four children.

Summary: This tutorial introduces you to IBM® Rational® Performance Tester and highlights its basic features. Practical, hands-on exercises teach you how to record automated performance tests, use data-driven techniques to ensure randomization, play-back tests, and evaluate real-time performance reports. Upon completing the tutorial you will be able to use Rational Performance Tester to determine the cause of performance problems in your applications.

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Date: 28 Feb 2007
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (748 KB | 28 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 32314 views
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Run an automated performance test

In this section you will learn how to execute your test against the Adventure Builder application and monitor the results.

Launch the test

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Select the topmost node in the Schedule Contents -- that is, the AdventureBuilderLoadTest node. A number of execution options are available in the tabs on the right-hand portion of the Performance Schedule Editor view. You can specify the number of users you want to emulate in the Number of users field on the General tab. Since the user groups in this schedule have been defined in terms of percentages, Performance Tester will do all the adjustments for you each time you change the size of your schedule. Leave the Number of users set to 5. The trial version of Performance Tester allows tests of a maximum of five emulated users. Attempting to run with more users will result in a license error.
Right-click the AdventureBuilderLoadTest schedule in the Test Navigator. Select Run As > Performance Schedule. This launches your performance test.

Figure 20. Run button on the toolbar

Monitor the test

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While your test is running, you can monitor its progress in near real-time. The Overall tab of the Performance Report view will show you test progress in the bar across the top. The bar graph will show the status code success rate for pages and elements. Both should show 100%. While the test is running you can browse the various tabs on the report to see what is happening.

Select the Summary tab along the bottom of the report. Basic statistics about the test run, pages, and page elements are given here. Note that these statistics will continue to update until the run has completed.
Select the Page Performance tab. This tab presents a bar graph of the average page response time for the 10 pages with the highest times.
Feel free to browse through the other report pages. The default information presented is relatively easy to read and gives you quick insights into the performance of Adventure Builder application. Note that the graph on the Resources tab will be blank: this is expected.
When the test has finished (note the progress bar on the Overall tab), go back to the Page Performance tab. You should notice that the Checkout page is considerably slower than any of the other pages.