SharePoint 2010 Performance (Stress, Load) Testing

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Update on 2-Oct-2010

Last year I had written a post on SharePoint 2007 Performance Testing that had a consolidated list of various types of resources available for performing load or performance testing on SharePoint 2007. Now, as the SharePoint 2010 is RTM, I though it would be good to have similar list for SharePoint 2010 also.

One thing to note is that many tools that you were using earlier such as VSTS, Fiddler, HttpWatch – they would remain same even now. However, what would change mainly is the bench marks (results) that have been collected based on real life tests. Like my earlier post, this post is not about planning capacity and performance. If you are looking for those resources, you can visit Performance and capacity management page at TechNet and find various resources available. This post is about performance testing of SharePoint 2010 – how to do, tools available, bench marks and analyzing results

I’ll keep updating this post as and when I find new stuff in this area.

Performance Testing Guidelines specific to SharePoint 2010

  • Performance testing for SharePoint Server 2010 - The technet article provides comprehensive guidelines on how to go about planning to executing performance testing on SharePoint 2010. It provides useful information, pointers and guidelines on different aspects of performance testing - creating test plan, creating test environment, creating tests and tools. It has tips on some of important aspects such as whether to use think time or not, whether to enable parse dependent requests or not, whether to track virtual users or RPS etc.
  • Monitoring and maintaining SharePoint Server 2010 - Though the article is about general monitoring, but you can also use it to monitor your servers while performance testing. It provides useful information on what performance counters you should monitor, and what should be reasonable values. However, be aware that list of counters provided here is not the complete list of counters that you would need to analyse SharePoint 2010 performance. For example, the article does not provide info about very important counters about different kinds of cache - output, blob, object cache.

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.

  • Performance and capacity test results and recommendations section provides a series of white papers describing the performance and capacity impact of specific feature sets included in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. These white papers include information such as: Test farm characteristics, Test results, Recommendations and Troubleshooting performance and scalability. The papers released at present are available for download here and are about these areas:
    • Access Services
    • Business Connectivity Services
    • Caches
    • Excel Services
    • InfoPath Forms Services
    • Large Lists
    • Large-scale document repositories
    • My Sites and social computing
    • Office Web Apps
    • PerformancePoint Services
    • Search
    • Visio Services
    • Web Analytics
    • Web Content Management
    • Word Automation Services
    • Workflows
  • More to come ….

Testing Tools

  • Load Testing Toolkit (LTK) – Microsoft has released this kit to assist an administrator to certify that an existing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 topology running on specific hardware can sustain an upgrade to a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 farm, with the same load. Hence, it’s NOT something that you can use for a new installation of SharePoint 2010, but you can always use the webTests created for another implementation as reference for a new implementation. Also, it uses VSTS 2008 and NOT 2010. This comes as part of SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit and you’ll need to download the admin toolkit to get the LTK. 

 

  • HP Sizer for SharePoint 2010 – Microsoft had a sizing tool for 2007, but the tool is not available for 2010. However, there’s tool available from HP.

 

…. would keep updating with more resources

Sanjay