Integration Rich client application with HP load runner - performance

We use Teamcenter software at our environment and it is a rich client Java application. We wanted to measure its performance by using the HP load runner software. However this is not working as the load runner is not able to start the application.
The support team of HP got back to us with the statement as below:
The root of the issue in fact that AUT has unexpected by Vugen
multi-process hierarchy, Vugen cannot record process outside of
single-root tree, specified at Start Recording Dialog. You can ask
your app Dev team to rebuild the software so all new process will be
children of parent process.
Can you please help me understand what can be done here?. Has anyone experienced such a problem?.
Thanks,
Pavan.

Big questions:
What is the next upstream architectural component from the client?
What well known ports/protocols are identified by a wireshark trace of your application?
When querying "The Google" using the terms "acuity teamcenter architecture" I ran across a SOA whitepaper that would suggest that at least some interfaces can be exercised via a standard HTTP client which could be captured via proxy. I do not know if the Java client leverages this same interface model, but if it does then changing your global application proxy to point to an instance of the LoadRunner HTTP recording proxy will then allow you to record the conversation.

Related

What are websites or applications for practicing performance testing from home

I want to practice performance testing at home using some load testing tool like jmeter. Can anybody tell me some links of websites or applications on which I can practice performance testing by throwing load by load testing tool from home?
It is not a LEGAL way to conduct load/stress test on any live websites/web applications without the permission.
So, you can deploy your own sample application or download sample applications available online and deploy it in your local server like Apache HTTP server or Apache Tomcat etc.
From my knowledge, You can use WebTours sample application from HP LoadRunner as an application to put your load.
Download HP Load Runner community edition from here. free for 50 vusers for life time. You need to create an account in the website.
You can download the webtours application from the HP website (comes with Apache HTTP server, which acts as a Web server).
Setup WebTours as per the instructions here
Confirm the successful installation/configuration by accessing the application from the browser (similar to http://localhost:8080/WebTours). The app is about flight booking (though not in real time ;) ).
Now, you can use the WebTours application as an AUT (Application Under Test)
Either you can continue with Load Runner or download latest JMeter version (3.1 as of now)
JMeter tutorials:
Getting Started
Component Reference
Builiding a Test plan
For Load Runner, there is documentation available in the following link to start with:
http://lrhelp.saas.hpe.com/en/12.53/help/WebHelp/Content/WelcomeContent/c_Welcome.htm
There is community support available managed by HP.
Use the sample applications which ship with the tool
Take your choice of open source application, install them on servers you own, manage and control. Use these applications as targets.
You are welcome to use api.jmeter.ninja. I built it for that purpose. A more formal API declaration is on it''s way but you can start with
http://api.jmeter.ninja/example.html.
http://api.jmeter.ninja/objects.xml
http://api.jmeter.ninja/objects/${OBJECT}.XML
Where ${OBJECT} is taken from the objects.xml page.
Or swap xml for dot json for the same in Jason format.
Exercises/Tutorial is available at http://api.jmeter.ninja/jmeter.pdf
Currently I just use this service for my own training sessions. But I hope to make it more generally available in the near future. There a currently no automatic limits so please just use your common sense and don't run high at throughput for a sustained periods of time. Anything under a total 100k requests is no problem.
Only caveat is that service is provided on a best effort basis at this point. Any abusive/problematic users may be blocked without notice.

Jmeter Mobile Native App Testing

I have Two Question related to Native App Performance Testing?
1)I have a Payment App, and it comes with bank security which is installed at the time of app installation. It sends an token number and rest of the data in encrypted format. Is it possible to handle such kind of request using Jmeter or any other performance testing tool, do i need to change some setting in app server or jmeter to get this done ?
2)Mobile App uses Device ID, so if i simulated load on cloud server it will use same Device ID which i used while creating script? is it possible to simulate different mobile ID to make it real-time?
any Help or references will be appreciated ..:)
(1) Yes. This is why performance testing tools are built around general purpose programming languages, to allow you (as the tester) to leverage your foundation skills in programming to leverage the appropriate algorithms and libraries to represent the same behavior as the client
(2) This is why performance testing tools allow for parameterization of the sending datastream to the server/application under test
I'm not an expert in JMeter. But work a lot with Loadrunner (LR) (Performance Testing Tool from HP). Though JMeter and LR are different tools, they work under same principle and objective and so objective of performance testing.
As James Pulley mentioned, the performance testing tool may have the capability. But the question is,
Have your tried recording your app with JMeter? Since your app is a native kind, please do the recording from simulator/emulator and check the feasibility. JMeter might not be the right candidate for mobile app load testing.
Alternatively there are lot of other tools available (both commercial and opensource) in market for your objective.
Best Regards
With the raise of several mobile network technologies, load testing a mobile application has become a different ball game in comparison with normal web app load testing. This is because of the differences in the response times that occur in different mobile networks such as 2G, 3G, 4G, etc. Additionally the client being a mobile device has plenty of physical constraints such as limited CPU, RAM, internal storage etc. All of these need to be considered while conducting performance testing of a mobile application if one wants to simulate a scenario close to a real time condition.
Coming to your 2 questions,
1) Yes it is possible but the amount of manual effort that needs to be invested to make the script execution ready might vary (since you are mentioning there is data in encrypted format - some are easy to understand and some are just crude and difficult to handle using JMeter). But there might not be any app server setting that would be required to change (unless of course you are unable to handle the encryption with JMeter in which case, the encryption might have to be disabled for QA phase)
2) As rightly said by James Pulley, these values can be parameterized. However, I fear that these values will be validated by the app server and hence the values need to be appropriately fed in the requests.
You can refer to this link for reference on how to do Mobile Performance Testing for Native application http://www.neotys.com/documents/doc/neoload/latest/en/html/#4234.htm#o4237
.The same could be extrapolated to JMeter to an extent.

Performance testing of Thick client

I have a thick client application to be tested. We need to downlod the jnlp file and then launch it, supply required credentials and click submit. It then launches the application.
I'm newbie to performance testing and want to performance test this application. Which open source tool will be useful, which is the best tool for testing thick clients?
What do you mean by "Performance testing of Thick client"? If it is about how fast it launches, downloads or operates than you need to loop into desktop automation software. The best open source tools currently available for desktop testing automation are:
Sikuli
LDTP
If your application does network communication and your scenario assumes simulating hundreds or thousands of simultaneous thick clients communicating with the server using the following open-source tools can help:
Grinder
Gatling
JMeter
Tsung
If your application supports proxy (given .jnlp - it is Java-based application and it surely does) and the protocol is HTTP(S) you will be able to record test scenario and replay. The Grinder tool recording proxy can go a lower level and perform TCP protocol recording.
For more information on main features comparison for performance testing tools listed above look into Open Source Load Testing Tools: Which One Should You Use? post.
If your application uses a form of secure communication or proprietary protocol you should be able to replicate it's behavior by plugging your application libraries to JMeter, Grinder or Gatling and use their multithreading and reporting features to perform massive load testing.

Functions used to connect Oracle DB

We are trying to connect oracle db from loadrunner. Could you please help us in providing these details. we wanted the script to get the data from oracle DB before starting the execution. In our testing we are used different application and protocols used Web http/html, Tuxedo and CRM aplls.
You are headed down a path which will cause you harm. Build your data files ahead of time and include them with the scripts. I could tell you how to solve your problem technically, but doing so would the the technical equivalent of instructing you how to use a gun to rob a bank, ultimately a bad set of advice. Your question also exposes a lack of critical skills in client side architecture and communications. This gap will not serve you well as a performance tester.

Performance monitoring all layers of a system

I use several loadtesting tools (Loadrunner, JMeter, NeoLoad) to performance test different applications. Im wondering if it is possible to monitor all layers of an application stack so for example. Say i have the following data chain.
Loadbalancer <-x-> Application Server <-x-> RMI <-x-> Java Application <-x-> MQ <-x-> Legacy application <-x-> Database
Where i have marked the x in the chain i am interested in monitoring, for example avg responsetimes.
Obviously we could simply create a wrapper on all endpoints which would gather the statistics for us and maybe we could import it into loadrunner or other loadtesting tools and sideline hem with the tools inbuilt performance statistics, but maybe there is tools/applications which already does this?
If not, how should we proceed, in order to gather this kind of statistics?
The standard for this was supposed to be Application Response Measurement (ARM). It was a cross language set of APIs that did just what you were looking for. The issue is that the products that implement this spec all tend to be big, expensive "enterprise" level monitoring tools. Think multi-week installs, consultants, more infrastructure and lots of buzzwords.
Still, if this is a mission critical app with a mission critical budget, this may be what you need. But you may be able to build your own that does just enough without too much effort. A quick search turns up at least one open source ARM implementation if you still want to use that API.
Another option is to simply to have transactions you can run against each tier of the system to check general responsiveness. For example you can have a static web page on the LB, a no-op tx on the app server, a "hello" servlet on the Java app, put a message directly on the queue, etc. During a performance / load test, these could be hit directly by the load testing tool or you could write a wrapper servlet / application call that does this as a single HTTP (RMI?) call. Running these a few times a minute won't add too much load to the system, but it should help you pinpoint which tier is slower. The nice thing about this approach is that it also works in production, just watch out for security issues.
For single user kind of test, where you know you have problem (e.g. this tx is "slow"), I have also had pretty good luck with network tracing. It's very tedious, but when you aren't sure what tier is slow, starting up a network trace on a few machines and running a single tx usually gives a good idea of what the system is doing.
I have handled this decomposition a number of ways in the past. The first is at a very low level using protocol analyzer dumped data to find the time points where a conversation leaves tier X and enters tier Y. The second method is through the use of log examination for the various tiers. Something that can make your examination quite usefule in this case is a common log server for all of your components (syslog, Rsyslog, etc....) and a nice log parsing tool, such as the freely available Microsoft Logparser. The third method utilization of the audit trail for an application stored in the database. You may find this when working on enterprise services bus style applications which have a consumer/producer model and a bus to pass information rather than a direct connection. The audit trails I have seen are typically stored in a database and allow the tracking of an individual transaction through the entire application infrastructure. Your Load balancer, as a network device, may be out of the hunt on this one.
Note, if you go the protocol analyzer or log route, then be sure and synchronize all of your source information devices to a common time server. Having one of your collectors (analyzer, app log) off on a time stamp basis can really be a hair pulling experience when you get into the analysis phase.
As to how you move from your collected data into LoadRunner, that part is very mechanical. The Analysis program supports an interface to import external datapoints. The format is very specific and is documented in both help and the online docs. This import process works very well, as I often have to use it for collection of statistics from hosts which I do not have direct monitoring access to, but which need to be included as a part of the monitored test infrastructure.
James Pulley
Moderator (YahooGroups LoadRunner, Advanced-Loadrunner; GoogleGroups lr-LoadRunner; Linkedin LoadRunner, LoadRunnerByTheHour; SQAForums LoadRunner, WinRunner)

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