SharePoint (Performance, Stress ) Load Testing

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Update (7-Jul-2010)

I have created another post on similar lines of this post for SharePoint 2010. One thing to note is that many tools that you were using earlier such as VSTS, Fiddler, HttpWatch – they would remain same even in 2010. However, what would change mainly is the bench marks (results) that have been collected based on real life tests. Also, if there are new tools which would be specific to SharePoint 2010, I’ll add it there. Also, I’ve added some more tools and links in this post based on comments in this blog.

Updated On 22-July-2009 

Whenever I've helped my customers in performance testing and analysis of SharePoint, I get one common question: Can you tell us more about "SharePoint Load Testing" and links where I can learn more? Doing a quick web search on "SharePoint Load Testing" or "SharePoint Performance Testing" - you get all kinds of results such as data population tools, performance tuning techniques, handling large lists etc. However, it's not very easy to get results about, How to go about load testing SharePoint, what are the counters that i should measure, where can i find real life bench mark results of SharePoint? That's exactly, what I am trying to in this post. I'm trying to cover all the resources that I know about load testing. I wouldn't be covering much about Performance Tuning and Analysis.

One important thing than many people don't know is this - There’s nothing much specific to SharePoint when it comes to performance testing. SharePoint provides a few objects (e.g. for Publishing Cache, Search Indexer). Otherwise, same principles that applies to ASP.net also apply to SharePoint. Basically, we have to analyze different objects and counters (Memory, CPU, Disk, Network, CLR) in relation with required parameters such as throughput, response time, user load etc. to find out various issues. Below is the list of resources that would help you in doing that:

Official Documentation

References of Real life performance testing to get the bench mark results

There are many times when you do performance testing in your environment, but don’t know if your results are good or not. The links in this section would help you in finding that.

Testing Tools

This section provides links to the tools that helps in the load testing.

Tools to generate load and test data:

Browsers Add-Ons: There are many good tools (mostly free) that integrate with your browser to analyze each and every activity happening through your browser. You can use these tools for tuning the performance of a web site by measuring parameters such as download times, caching or the number of network round trips. [Thanks to Ed Glas for suggesting some of these tools.]

  • Fiddler – a very handy and light weight tool that can provide quick overview of you web site performance. It can also records scripts that you can use in VSTS. This MSDN article provides detailed information on how Fiddler can be used for performance tuning.
  • neXpert - an add-on to Fiddler which automates the classic performance best practice checks and produces a HTML report on the issues found in a Fiddler capture. Also adds the ability to insert step markers in Fiddler sessions to associate network objects together (create transactions). Check out more here
  • HttpWatch - an HTTP viewer and debugger. Available in commercial as well as free variants. 
  • FireBug – provides many web development tools. Integrates only with FireFox
  • YSlow - analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. Integrates only with FireFox

At times, you need to focus on end-user response time. As it is difficult to simulate real life network bandwidth, it becomes difficult to test, how your application perform for end users. The following tools help you to find end-user experience

  • Visual Round Trip Analyzer - Web page performance visualizer and analyzer tool. You can find Ed Glas’s blog post introducing this tool and detailed article on using the tool.
  • webPageTest -   webPageTest is a free over-the-web tool for performance testing a page from either Dulles, VA, USA or Wellington New Zealand. Pagetest allows you to provide the URL of a webpage to be tested provides a waterfall of your page load performance as well as a comparison against an optimization checklist.

There are other tools available for sizing and capacity planning also such as HP ProLiant Sizer for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool from Microsoft

Log Parser 2.2 is another powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files. You can use this tool to query SharePoint and IIS logs and get very useful analysis about potential issue. There’s a white paper, Analyzing Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Usage, that discusses how to gather and analyze SharePoint data using this tool.

Useful Blogs, Third Party Articles

ASP.Net performance testing and Analysis

The following links provide information on performance testing of ASP.net based web sites. Everything you wanted to know such as how to setup Performance Monitor, what counters to analyze, what should be threshold value of the counters, what to do if some counters are overshooting the threshold – you’ll get here.

SharePoint Performance Improvements

Though this post is focuses on Performance Testing, I’m also providing a few links on Performance improvements, tuning and optimazation

Hopefully, you’ll find these useful

- Sanjay

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2009
    PingBack from http://asp-net-hosting.simplynetdev.com/sharepoint-performance-stress-load-testing/

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2009
    Here is a good whitepaper from the same people who provide the webPageTest link above. It focuses on page requests and load times. http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/Measure%20SharePoint%20Performance.aspx

  • Anonymous
    May 06, 2009
    Sanjay Narang has compiled a great set of links on performance testing SharePoint . Check them out! This

  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2009
    Many times, I get question from my customers if they should build a new application in SharePoint or

  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2009
    Great resource. Would suggest adding Aptimize Website Accelerator to the SharePoint Performance Improvements section, MS recently used it to increase the performance of their Sharepoint site http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/09/28/how-we-did-it-speeding-up-sharepoint-microsoft-com.aspx

  • Anonymous
    January 08, 2010
    You might want to check out a cloud-based <a href="http://loadstorm.com/performance-testing">performance testing tool</a>.  Free subscription for 50 users.

  • Anonymous
    February 25, 2010
    Many a times i use to think about the share point when my friends use to talk about it. And then i got to know it better.It was best when i implemented it. check this out. At my time i did not got free. But for you its free for 30days- http://www.sharepointperth.com/30-day-sharepoint-trial

  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2010
    SharePoint experiences degraded performance at peak load times. This big software application lacks performance and scalability handling. Some software companies have provided caching solutions to SharePoint. some of those solutions i know of include NCachePoint, StoragePoint and AvePoint. Just read about NCachePoint on www.cmswire.com. This program uses  distributed caching underneath SharePoint for caching BLOBs, sessions, Lists and Views. SharePoint 2007 failed to manage performance issues, what about SharePoint 2010, is it going to remain the same or will it also demand the need of caching solutions for resolving its performance and scalability issues? Users feedback awaited

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2010
    @fred You are right, we do have performance issues with SharePoint at peak load times. It is because disk-based storage is slow, especially when you have to handle frequent user requests for data. Secondly, SQL Server is not good enough for BLOB storage, quering and reading. I've used the free edition of Ncachepoint, downloadable from http://www.alachisoft.com/download.html Ncachepoint externalizes BLOB storage and distributes them across cache servers. This nice software showed a considerable difference in SharePoint perofmance. Its techniques for performance boost include BLOB, List and Session caching as well as minification, combinition of multiple CSS and Javascrips, which all together helps considerbalyin giving you best of the scalable performance no matter how much load you put on the application.

  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2010
    Great post. Surprised not to see the aptimize sharepoint accelerator mentioned this has been a life saver for dealing with sharepoint performance issues.

  • Anonymous
    October 19, 2010
    We've used apache's JMeter a bunch to do stress testing on our various webservers, including sharepoint.  You basically tell it what urls to load and a load profile and it runs till the performance starts dropping. For test-after functional testing, we've used different tools including Selenium/Bromine (though last time I looked, Bromine isn't quite enterprise worthy) and iMacros.  I'm a huge fan of iMacros.  For a poor person's load test, you can record a quick macro that browses through your most popular pages on the site, then run it on a loop from 20 different firefox windows to make sure your site can handle that many users. For a previous non-sharepoint web project, we used Bromine to run our selenium test cases on a schedule and we got a good nightly email telling us if our latest build broke anything (that we tested for).  

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2011
    Improve reading files performance for SharePoint 2010 / Tăng hiệu suất đọc file cho SharePoint 2010  sharepointtaskmaster.blogspot.com/.../improve-reading-files-performance-for.html

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    Hi, Here is the blog contains Reusable sharepoint Test Scenarios sharepointtesting.blogspot.com Might be this will be very usefull for those who are very new to sharepoint testing for any more docs, doubts and for suggestions your mails are welcome to edwinraj.p@gmail.com                             Regards, Edwin Antony

  • Anonymous
    December 12, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2012
    I need to know how can I check number of active users hitting one front end server at given time (real time)... is there any tool to check that ?