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:
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.
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.]
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
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.
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.
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