SharePoint Config

Performance testing can be useful exercise for many SharePoint deployments. It allows you to validate your infrastructure decisions, identify and iron out any bottlenecks, and prove that the environment can effectively handle the expected user load. It can also be useful to measure the effect of changes to the environment, and allows you to configure the environment for optimal performance.

To assist SharePoint performance testing projects I have created the SharePoint Performance Testing project on CodePlex. The project consists of a series of load tests and some guidance documentation that can be used to quickly get a performance test underway. I have created these tests using Visual Studio 2008 Team Test Edition (VSTT) as it provides an easy way of managing and running the tests against a farm environment. As a start I have created tests that include common SharePoint user actions such as browsing, searching, uploading and downloading files.

The goal of the project is to make it as easy as possible to get up and running so all you need to get started is a URL of a SharePoint site and an account. It is then easy to extend the core tests with information about your site so that the tests reflect actual usage (e.g. pages to use for the browse test, documents to use for uploading etc) as this information is all stored within a set of configuration files, rather than within the test themselves.

Figure 1. Adding entries to the Pages.csv file will result in these URLs being used in the ‘browsing’ load tests.

Once you are happy with the configuration you can then create a load test or use one of the example ones included to simulate a variety of actions on your site. For example the ‘Collaboration’ load test uses a mix of browsing, searching, uploading and downloading. Settings such as the number of users to simulate, and the servers to monitor can be selected. Once this is in place Visual Studio can run the tests and collect a rich set of statistics as shown below.

Figure 2. A small subset of the statistics recorded for a load test showing CPU and Memory utilisation on all servers in a SharePoint testing farm.

There are a lot of things to consider in a performance testing project so I’ll be following this up with a series of posts on this, but in the meantime if you would like to try the performance tests please do. Any feedback or feature requests are welcome. You will need either Visual Studio 2008 Test Edition or the Team Suite Edition (or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate).

A more detailed description of how to use the tool is included in the documentation on Codeplex.