I am running my jmeter script for almost a week and observed an interesting thing today. Below is the scenario:
Overview: I am gradually increasing the load on the application. In my last test I gave load of 100 users on the app and today I increased the load to 150 users.
Result of 150 users test:
Response time of the requests decreased compared to the last test. (Which is a good sign)
Throughput decreased drastically to half of what I got in the previous test with less load.
Received 225 errors while executing the test.
My questions are:
What could be the possible reason for such strange behavior of throughput? Why did throughput decrease instead of increasing with the increasing load?
Did I get good response time as many of my requests failed?
NOTE: Till 100 users test throughput was increasing with the increasing load of users.
Can anyone please help me with this question. I am a new bee in performance testing. Thanks in Advance!!
Also, would like to request if anyone can suggest good articles/site etc on finding performance bottleneck and learning crucial things in performance.
Most probably these 225 requests which failed returned failure immediately therefore average response time decreased, that's why you should be looking into i.e. Response Times Over Time chart and pay more attention to percentiles as mean response time can mask the real problem.
With regards to the bottleneck discovery, make sure to collect as much information from the server side as you can, i.e.
CPU, RAM, Network, Disk usage from JMeter PerfMon Plugin
Slow queries log from the database
"heaviest" functions and largest objects from the profiling tool for your application
Related
I am testing a scenario with 400 threads. Although I am almost getting no errors, I have very high average response. What can bring about this problem? Seems like server gives no time-out but gives response so late. I've addded the summary report. It is as follows:
This table doesn't tell the full story, if response time seems "so high" to you - this is definitely the bottleneck and you can report it already.
What you can do to localize the problem is:
Consider using a longer ramp-up period, i.e. start with 1 user and add 1 more user every 5 seconds (adjust these numbers according to your scenario) so you would have arrival phase, the "plateau" and the load decrease phase. This approach will allow you to correlate increasing load and increasing response time by looking at Active Threads Over Time and Response Times Over Time charts. This way you will be able to state that:
response time remains the same up to X concurrent users
after X concurrent users it starts growing so throughput is going down
after Z concurrent users response time exceeds acceptable threshold
It would also be good to see CPU, RAM, etc. usage on the server side as increased response time might be due to lack of resources, you can use JMeter PerfMon Plugin for this
Inspect your server configuration as you might need to tune it for high loads (same applies to JMeter, make sure to follow JMeter Best Practices)
Use a profiler tool on server side during the next test execution, it will show you the slowest places in your application code
Load is not getting increased in AppD when we increase the threads count in JMeter. For example, if we are able to achieve 100k calls/min for 500 users with 20 ms avg response time. Load remains at 135 k with 25ms avg resp time when we give 1200 as threads in JMeter. Even we increase the load thrice, load is not going to the application. Didn't observe errors in JMeter as well. We are giving host entries in all the load generators. Is that could be a reason for controlling the load from JMeter? Request help to resolve this issue please
If you increase the number of threads and the throughput is not increasing there could be 2 possible reasons for this:
The throughput is not increasing as response time is increasing which indicates your application performance bottleneck, look at Response Times vs Threads and the point where the response time starts increasing will match the maximum number of users your application can support
JMeter is not capable of sending requests fast enough due to lack of resources or improper configuration, make sure to follow JMeter Best Practices and if it doesn't help - consider allocating more load generator machines and switch to Distributed Mode of JMeter tests execution
As depicted in the following graph, the relationship between the load (Uvsers) and KPIs such as Throughput (TP) is non-linear. At certain point, increasing the load will not result on an increased Throughput that is proportional/linear (the Heavy Load zone).
Do we need to adjust Throughput given by jmeter, to find out the actual tps of the system
For eg : I am getting 100 tps for concurrent 250 users. This ran for 10 hrs. Can I come to a conclusion like my software can handle 100 transactions per second. Or else do I need to do some adjustment and need to get a value. Why i am asking this because when load started, system will take sometime to perform in adequate level (warm up time). If so how to do this. Please help me to understand this.
By default JMeter sends requests as fast as it can, the main factor which are affecting TPS rate are:
number of threads (virtual users) - this you can define in Thread Group
your application response time - this is not something you can control
Ideally when you increase number of threads the number of TPS should increase by the same factor, i.e. if you have 250 users and getting 100 tps you should get 200 tps for 500 users. If this is not the case - these 500 users are beyond saturation point and your application bottleneck is somewhere between 250 and 500 users (if not earlier).
With regards to "warm up" time - the recommended approach of conducting the load is doing it gradually, this way you will allow your application to get prepared to increasing load, warm up caches, let JIT compiler/optimizer to go their work, etc. Moreover this way you will be able to correlate the increasing load with increasing/decreasing throughput, response time, number of errors, etc. while having 250 users released at once doesn't tell the full story. See
The system warmup period varies from one system to the other. Warm up period is where configurations are cached, different libraries are initialized (eg. Builder.init()) and other initial functions that usually don't happen for subsequent calls. If you study results of the load test, there is a slow period at the very beginning. For most systems, it could be as small as 5 to 10 minutes. These values could be even negligible if the test is as long as 10 hours. But then again, average calculation can be effected if the results give extremely low values at the start (it always depend on the jump from initial warming up period to normal operations).
As per jmeter configurations this thread may explain the configuration. How to exclude warmup time from JMeter summary?
In Starting of script sample time is less and then it starts increasing as the load increasing, is it the correct way to do load testing for website?
Please help, which is the correct way to do load testing for website
Not really, in ideal world response time should remain the same as the load increases like:
1 user - response time 1 second - throughput 1 request per second
100 users - response time 1 second - throughput 100 requests per second
200 users - response time 1 second - throughput 200 requests per second
etc.
The situation when response time doesn't start increasing is called saturation point - it is the maximum throughput your application can support.
The situation when response time starts increasing as you start more threads (virtual users) is known as the bottleneck and the question is: whether performance is still acceptable for that number of users that is defined in NFR and/or SLA. If yes - you're good to go, if not - you need to report this issue (it would be beneficial if you could try to determine reason for this)
The correct way of load testing the website is simulating end users activity as close as possible including workload model. Remember to increase the load gradually, this way you will be able to correlate increasing load with metrics like response time, throughput, number of errors. It is also good to decrease the load gradually as well to see whether your website recovers when the load gets back to normal/zero.
I use Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite for load testing of my Web-application (it uses ASP.MVC technology).
Load pattern:Constant (this means I have constant amount of virtual users all the time).
I specify coniguratiton of 1000 users to analyze perfomance of my Web-application in really stress conditions.I run the same load test multiple times while making some changes in my application.
But while analyzing load test results I come to a strange dependency: when average page response time becomes larger,the requests per second value increases too!And vice versa:when average page response time is less,requests per second value is less.This situation does not reproduce when the amount of users is small (5-50 users).
How can you explain such results?
Perhaps there is a misunderstanding on the term Requests/Sec here. Requests/Sec as per my understanding is just a representation of how any number of requests that the test is pushing into the application (not the number of requests completed per second).
If you look at it that way. This might make sense.
High Requests/Sec will cause higher Avg. Response Time (due to bottleneck somewhere, i.e. CPU bound, memory bound or IO bound).
So as your Requests/Sec goes up, and you have tons of object in memory, the memory is under pressure, thus triggering the Garbage Collection that will slow down your Response time.
Or as your Requests/Sec goes up, and your CPU got hammered, you might have to wait for CPU time, thus making your Response Time higher.
Or as your Request/Sec goes up, your SQL is not tuned properly, and blocking and deadlocking occurs, thus making your Response Time higher.
These are just examples of why you might see these correlation. You might have to track it down some more in term of CPU, Memory usage and IO (network, disk, SQL, etc.)
A few more details about the problem: we are load testing our rendering engine [NDjango][1] against the standard ASP.NET aspx. The web app we are using to load test is very basic - it consists of 2 static pages - no database, no heavy processing, just rendering. What we see is that in terms of avg response time aspx as expected is considerably faster, but to my surprise the number of requests per second as well as total number of requests for the duration of the test is much lower.
Leaving aside what we are testing against what, I agree with Jimmy, that higher request rate can clog the server in many ways. But it is my understanding that this would cause the response time to go up - right?
If the numbers we are getting really reflect what's happening on the server, I do not see how this rule can be broken. So for now the only explanation I have is that the numbers are skewed - something is wrong with the way we are configuring the tool.
[1]: http://www.ndjango.org NDjango
This is a normal result as the number of users increases you will load the server with higher numbers of requests per second. Any server will take longer to deal with more requests per second, meaning the average page response time increases.
Requests per second is a measure of the load being applied to the application and average page response time is a measure of the applications performance where high number=slow response.
You will be better off using a stepped number of users or a warmup period where the load is applied gradually to the server.
Also, with 1000 virtual users on a single test machine, the CPU of the test machine will be absolutely maxed out. That will most likely be the thing that is skewing the results of your testing. Playing with the number of virtual users you will find that there will be a point where the requests per second are maxed out. Adding or taking away virtual users will result in less requests per second from the app.