Performance Testing Guidance from Microsoft

I always admire Microsoft for its documentation. Right from OS to Office applications, you can find good documentation. Microsoft has shared very good articles for performance testing and tuning.

You can find more articles related to Performance testing available from
Patterns & Practices: Performance Testing Guidance . Just listed only How-TOs part. Thanks to Microsoft!!!

Performance Testing

• How To: Conduct Performance Testing Core Steps for a Web Application
• How To: Determine Performance Testing Objectives
• How To: Conduct Performance Testing
• How To: Conduct Performance Testing with Automated Load Testing Tools
• How To: Manage The Performance Test Cycle_Agile
• How To: Manage The Performance Test Cycle_CMMI
• How To: Consolidate Various Types of Performance Acceptance Criteria
• How To: Coordinate Performance Testing With an Iteration Base Process
• How To: Evaluate Systems to Improve Performance Testing Effectiveness
• How To: Quantify End-User Response Time Goals
• Explained: Types of Performance Testing
• Explained: Key Mathematic Principles for Performance Testers

Capacity

• How To: Capacity Plan for Web Applications Using Transaction Cost Analysis
• How To: Capacity Plan for Web Applications Using Predictive Analysis

Load Testing

• How To: Load Test Web Applications
• How To: Step Through Creating a Load Test in Visual Studio Team System
• How To: Load Test Web Applications Using Visual Studio Team System
• How To: Use Data Binding in Load Tests in Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

Stress Testing

• How To: Stress Test Web Applications

Test Cases/Scripting

• How To: Control the Number of Load Test Iterations in Visual Studio Team System
• How To: Create a Load Test Plug-In using Visual Studio Team System
• How To: Correlate Dynamic Data in a Load Test Transaction
• How To: Programmatically Set Think Time Between Test Iterations in Visual Studio Team System

Troubleshooting

• How To: Identify Functions Causing High CPU
• How To: Identify a Disk Performance Bottleneck Using SPA

Tuning

• How To: Tune Performance of Web Applications

Workload Modeling

• How To: Use IIS Log Files In Performance Testing
• How To: Model the Workload for Web Applications
• How To: Model the User Experience from Web Server Logs
• How To: Model User Delays and Think Times
• How To: Account for User Abandonment
• How To: Model Application Usage without Empirical Data
• How To: Model an Application Usage

Hope all these links would be useful..

JVM Monitoring

Couple of our applications are using Tomcat server. JMeter was used as load testing tool. To monitor Java memory, I used two options. One is JMX(Java Management Extensions) console and Psi-Probe.

To implement those options, you should add following entries into catalina.sh

set CATALINA_OPTS=-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote \
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=9005 \
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false \
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false

To access JMX console,Enter command ==> [java_installation]\bin\jconsole hostname:port
To use Probe, you need to deploy in tomcat server instance and then access the probe application.

Tip1 - To measure the App or System performance

Using Windows Performance monitor, we can collct performance data automatically from local or remote computers. Below steps will give you, how to set the counter in your machine or server. Depends upon the options, user can set any type of counter.

Steps:
1. GoTo Start->Run
2. Type "PerfMon" and Click OK button.
3. It will open performance app window.
4. GoTO Performance Logs and Alerts-> Counter Logs.
5. In the Right side Pane, right click on empty space and select 'New Log Settings'.
6. Enter the name for the log file.
7. In General Tab, you can see log file name. Click Add counter button.
8. Select that computer, 'Processor' as performance Object, '%Proccessor Time' as selected counter from list.
9. Also 'Total' as selected instance from list and click Add button.
10. Again select 'Memory' as performance Object, 'Availabile MBytes' as selected counter from list.
11. click Add button and close button. Set interval period.
12. Goto LogFiles TAB. Give log files path. Select 'Text File - CSV' as your log type and click apply button.
13. GoTo Schedule TAB and select manually.
14. Now setting entry has been created. To Run, Select that entry and Right click and select Start, before running your application.