Stress-Test Web Forms and Services With ACT
VS.NET Enterprise and Architect editions' Application Center Test simplifies multiclient load testing by recording browser requests.
by Roger Jennings
Posted June 27, 2002
Matt Odhner's "Web Services Testing Using Application Center Test" Tech•Ed 2002 presentation (DEV343) gave many attendees an introduction to Microsoft's newest ASP and ASP.NET stress-testing tool. If you've ever attempted to set up and run the original Web Application Stress Tool (WAS), formerly code-named Homer, you'll welcome ACT's VBScript macro recording feature and built-in graphing capability.
ACT is a Web application and service-capacity planning tool included with Visual Studio .NET's Enterprise Developer and Architect editions. You can integrate ACT with the Visual Studio .NET IDE to create an ACT project or run stress tests from ACT's UI. Act.exe, which Microsoft derived from WAS, provides much more detailed reports than the integrated version.
I've relied primarily on multiple instances of Windows form consumers to check data-intensive XML Web service performance and detailed Trace.axd reports to measure the response time of Web form consumers. I was particularly interested in using ACT to measure the benefits of caching my site's static ASP.NET pages and the most popular requests from dynamic pages. Another objective was to investigate performance bottlenecks in dynamic pages that aren't suited to caching.
If you haven't become acquainted with ACT, here's the drill for generating ACT test regimens with Act.exe's browser recording feature:
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If your test site uses HTTPS and SSL, temporarily revert to HTTP during test generation.
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Launch Act.exe from Programs | Microsoft Visual Studio .NET | Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Features | Microsoft Application Center Test to open the default ACT Samples project.
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Right-click on the Tests node, select New Test to start the New Test Wizard, and click on Next to open the Test Source dialog.
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Select the Record a New Test option, and click on Next twice to accept the VBScript language default, open the Browser Record dialog, and click on Start Recording to open an instance of IE.
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Replace about: blank with your starting URL in the Address textbox and record the sequence of operations to execute.
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Return to the Wizard, click on Stop Recording, close IE, and click on Next.
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In the Test Properties dialog, type the name of the test, click on Next and Finish to dismiss the Wizard, and click on the test name item under the Tests node to display the VBScript code for the test (see Figure 1 and Listing 1). You can eliminate unneeded
GET operations by commenting out call SendRequest# instructions in Sub Main at the bottom of the script.
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Right-click on the TestName item and choose Properties to open the General page of the TestName Properties dialog, where you set the number of simultaneous browser connections and duration or number of iterations of the test. Use a single connection and 100 iterations for the initial test (see Figure 2).
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Press Ctrl+S to save the project and Ctrl+F5 to start the test. Clicking on the Show Details button displays a requests/second graph (see Figure 3). Click on Close to return to ACT when the test completes.
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Click on the Results node, expand the TestName node, and mark the checkbox for the test to display a summary graph of requests/second (see Figure 4). ACT provides detailed tabular test data below the graph.
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