Check Application Performance Under Load Test Using Visual Studio

Apart from that you can also specify the Sampling Rate and Validation level (validation that was mentioned during the web performance tests like Response Goal should be 1 second).

Step 10. Double-click the .loadtest file and click the Run test button to run the load test.

Click Manage Test Controller, here you can also provide a Database connection (The database name is LoadTest2010) where you want to store load test results.

Note. If you don’t have the LoadTest2010 database on the server. Then go to the IDE folder on your machine where Visual Studio installs search for the “loadtestresultsrepository.sql” file and run the same on the server to create the LoadTest2010 database. E.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\loadtestresultsrepository.sql

Now you have done all the required settings for the Load test, so let us run the Load test and verify the results step by step.

Run Load Test and analyze the results

Step 1. Click the Run button, after running successfully different types of result reports are available like Summary, Graphical, Table, or Details. By default, Summary will open, and here the following points to be noted down.

Top five slowest pages, here you can get a list of pages which are taking more time for processing.

Total number of Web Performance Test cased execution distribution, as we specified distribution during load test creation admin 71% and accountant 29%.

Type of errors occurs, here ResponseGoal was set 1 second for all pages under admin web performance test but almost all the pages fail to achieve this target. On clicking of Error link, you can also get exact details.

Step 2. Click Graphs, here you can see multiple graphs at a time. On the left-hand side, Counter set values for all resources consumed. On the right-hand side, resource consumption details are in the form of Graphs and Range (Max, Min, and Avg) values.

Under the Counter Set panel, under the Computer Name node, all resource data is available. Some of them are highlighted below.

1. .NET CLR resources: It provides all resource consumption against load tests like how many bytes from the heap are consumed by your application. On the right-hand side under the Key Indicator graph, you can see .NET CLR memory from heap consumption is increasing during load. Here you can take decision if there is any memory leakage or not.
2. IIS (ASP.NET/ASP.Net Application): It provides resource consumption at the IIS level like Request/Sec, Session Active, Request Rejected (due to security or any reason), Request Queued, Output Cache Hit Ratio (how many pages are processed directly from cache), Cache Hit Ratio (how many times application cache used), etc.
3. Memory: It provides how much memory is consumed during load tests like % Committed Byte In Use, and Available Mbytes (amount of physical memory, in MB, available to running processes).
4. Network Interface: It provides network resource consumption like Bytes sent/sec, Bytes received/sec, and Current Bandwidth. Here you can make a decision if bandwidth consumption more, then try to make a request/repose size optimization by taking the following action for the same.
   • Use Ajax calls (lightweight requests)
   • Use JSON serialization instead of XML serialization (lightweight response).
   • Use client-side cache, if the same static data needs to be processed from the server multiple times (make sure not to cache secure or unnecessary data on the browser as it also has limited memory).
5. Process: It provides what are processes used by your application and what are their consumption like “% processor time”, Handle Count, and Thread Count taken by the SQL server, devenv (visual studio).
6. SQL Server resources: It provides all consumption at the SQL server level like Full scan/sec, Index search/sec, Transactions/sec, Lock Timeout/sec, and Number of Deadlock/sec. Here you can see what issues occur at heavy load on the database side (e.g. deadlock, timeout, table scan).

To see recourse usage details, double-click on the same and their respective details will be available on the right-hand side in the form of Graphs and Range values as in the above image.

In Graphs, the horizontal axis represents the time duration with a fraction of 10 seconds. I run the load test only for 3 minutes.

• Key Indicator graph: I selected the following resources from the Counter set.
• User Load: It increases every 10 sec, starts from 10, and reaches up to 180 (in 3 min).
• Transaction/sec: Transactions/sec increase with respect to user load.
• Bytes in all Heap: It increases with user load. But if it sharply rises then there can be memory leakage problems like resources do not release properly after consumption.
  
• Page Response Time: Click pages from Counter ⇒ Scenario ⇒ Web Performance Test ⇒ Pages Page Name, against which you want to check performance across load test. On the graph, you can see how it performs when the load increases. As the load increases, its performance goes down. There are multiple properties that you can check against any page like average page Time, Pages/Sec, etc.
  
• Controller and Agent: System resources like % CPU utilization, Memory utilization, Network I/O bytes sent and received per second, and .NET CLR threads can be checked here. Here CPU % usage exceeds the threshold value of 80%.
  

If you want to share your application results with peers then export test results to an Excel file. To export into Excel format, click the Create Excel Report icon under the Load Test result toolbar. On click, it will open an Excel file with the following window and provide the required input.

Note. Load Test Excel plug-in (as shown in the above image) might not load properly. To correct this, in Microsoft Excel 2010 or later, follow these steps.

1. In the Office ribbon, choose File.
2. Choose Options and then choose Add-Ins.
3. In the drop-down list under Manage, choose COM Add-Ins, and then select Go.
4. Select the checkbox for Load Test Report Addin.

Once the Excel plug-in is loaded properly then perform the following steps.

1. Select Create Report
2. Select Trend
3. Provide Report Name
4. Select Load Test results that need to be provided in the report (if the same Load Test runs multiple times)
5. Select the Resource name against which the Counter value needs to be captured in the Excel report.

It will generate an Excel report that contains a table of contents as the first worksheet and the remaining counter set values as per the workbook as in the following,

If you compare the results with the previous article, where all the web pages are working fine (except one stud_entry.aspx) but under load (where max user load is only 180 users) all the page's performance goes down as you can see below.

Note. If you already write unit test cases for your application, then you can also run a Load test against the same. No need to create a Web Performance Test (UI steps recording). Please refer to this link for more details: Creating and Running a Load Test Containing Unit Tests.

Lastly, Load test results also depend upon your current machine configuration and several processes running over the same. So make sure whenever you run a Load test on your local machine keep all the unnecessary processes closed to get more corrective results.

After running the load test you can get what are the pages that need improvements. Now need to identify which area of code is taking more time to execute. You can use Stopwatch under System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch to get methods that take more execution time, as you can see below.

Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch();
watch.Start();

// Call your code here

watch.Stop();

// You can capture execution time in logs to verify the results later
Console.WriteLine("Measured time: " + watch.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds + " ms.");

For more details about Stopwatch, you can refer here.

By using all these steps, as a developer you have scope and area of code that requires manipulation from a performance point of view. No need to wait for any performance testing team to achieve these results, it will take only 15-20 minutes for any developer to check their application performance.

Let’s summarize both articles again step by step through the following diagram. Now you can evaluate your work better than others.

In my next article, I will explain, performance optimization checkpoints that need to be taken care of in the following phases

• Architect
• Design
• Implementation

References

• Creating and Running a Load Test Containing Web Performance Tests