Running a Project Server 2007 performance test lab
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Topic Last Modified: 2010-01-15
Running a performance test lab against an Office Project Server 2007 solution can be quite a complex task, due to the variety of user interactions and system behaviors involved. The set of articles that follows this one is designed as a general guide for creating and running a performance test lab for Project Server 2007.
Types of load
The following are the main types of load that we normally need to reproduce in a performance test environment.
User-initiated operations involving Project Web Access
User-initiated operations involving Project Professional
Background operations
Testing strategies
Testing strategies can include independent loads or mixed loads composed of different operations. Measuring how the systems react to the load produced by a single specific operation by many simulated users at the same time can help determine a reference measure for peak periods of that specific operation. Mixed-load strategies are more realistic and can be used to simulate how the systems react to several possible usage patterns. For example, let's say you are concerned about the timesheet submission load, which according to your specific scenario has a peak period on Friday afternoon for all users. You can then test the system by simulating timesheet submissions only, without any other simulated load. These results will provide a reference baseline as measured by maximum throughput (that is, how many timesheets can be submitted/processed per hour) of the system for the particular operation under investigation.
You may also want to test the system under a combination of different operations at the same time, using usage profiles as similar as possible to your real scenario. Ideally you would use historical logs from the production system as a data source to determine the usage profiles to be tested.
Regardless of the overall testing strategies you want to adopt, the following related articles describe in more detail how to plan and simulate the load types that belong to the three categories that were discussed earlier. Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition provides the foundation for all the scenarios. By using Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition, you can easily balance multiple load types in one single load test to run for a given period of time.
See Also
Concepts
Planning a Project Server 2007 test lab
Key metrics for Project Server 2007 performance
Setting up a Project Server 2007 test environment
Testing user-initiated read-only operations involving Project Web Access
Testing user-initiated writer operations involving Project Web Access
Testing user-initiated operations involving Project Professional
Testing Project Server 2007 background operations
Extracting and analyzing lab test data