Load Testing your SharePoint 2013 Servers - Visual Studio 2012 Load Test

So I have been using the Visual Studio load testing for every Infrastructure roll out I have worked on since it was released!

It's a great tool for testing all web servers not just SharePoint.

I am going to run through a very basic test, I found that there is plenty of useful information out there on this subject. But as I always do in my blogs I am trying to pull all the required information together in one easy to follow step by step guide.

I found other sources with steps for creating a web test, but no mention of a load test and similarly load test instructions with no mention of creating the web test first.

So the basic principals I use when planning a load test are:

You can create a web test in your Visual Studio project. This is just a recording of some steps you do in a browser, Visual Studio will then take that recording, remove the junk from the HTTP requests and leave just the calls to the web site you want to repeat over and over in your load test later on.

Once we have a web test, this could be of a single page load, multiple document uploads or anything you like. We then create a load test and configure that load test based on our requirements.

In that load test you can configure the number of concurrent users which is going to create the load on your servers!

Now for the steps.

Create a new Visual Studio project

 

 

Name your project.

Hit the record button to begin capturing your test in the browser which should open automatically.

Make sure that Internet explorer enhanced security is off (IE ESC) or this won't start and you will get an error. You can do this in server manager.

Browse to a site and begin performing the tasks you want your load test to simulate.

Hit stop recording once you have captured the simulated set of tasks. For my needs I just loaded three pages.

You will see once you stop that the web test is saved in your project, we can now use this is the base for our load test.

Right click the project title in solution explorer.

Add > Load Test

Follow the wizard to create the load test.

There is various configuration options in the wizard that you may wish to change dependent on your scenario and test requirements.

Name your Load test.

Set your number of concurrent users, you may find you need to tweak this and try some different numbers to see how the server reacts to the load.

My virtual server has 16GB RAM and 4 processors so lets see how it gets on with 100 concurrent page views.

Read through the descriptions of the different test mix models, I went for the number of virtual users to simulate 100 users.

Click add to choose our recorded web test.

Select the web test to add it to the load test. You could always have multiple web tests, for example one to simulate uploads and one for page views so that it all runs on the server concurrently.

You can tweak the distribution if you want, this ties in with the mix models if you want to set only a percentage of your users to be running the test at the same time.

You have the option to change network and browser types, not required in my basic example.

You can set computers and counter sets here too.

I'm just going to fire up resource monitor to show you how the server reacts.

Set the duration of the test.

Right click the load test and select 'Run Load Test'

Check the impact on your server!

If it's not enough just tweak the number of concurrent users, I find it useful to have a few load tests with different number of users so you can see how the servers react to 100, 200, 300 users and so on.

Thanks for reading,
Matt