wingperf CS Project Proposal Group Name - 4wings A Framework for Designing and Executing Web Application Performance Tests Group Members

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1 CS Project Proposal wingperf A Framework for Designing and Executing Web Application Performance Tests Group Name - 4wings Group Members Ashan J.M G Samarappuli K.H V Wanniarachchi S.K E Wanniarachchi U.V L

2 Introduction The number of web applications today is more than likely in the millions and it is rapidly increasing on a daily basis. An average web application has thousands of guests within a day. Therefore one of the major issues in most of the web applications today is assuring the satisfactory service level to its users especially in terms of response time or data throughput. Even though today web applications are much attractive, informative and rich with features visitors get annoyed if a page takes so much time to load. That s where performance testing becomes extremely important. Performance testing is done for two reasons. The first reason is to ensure that the web application will stand for the given workload. It is to establish how much performance can be expected from the web application as it exists today. The second reason is to plan in order to support greater workloads that will occur in future. Furthermore, performance testing supports in benchmarking web applications and diagnosing system bottlenecks as well. A systematic approach of performance evaluation involves several steps. First of all define system and goal(s) properly is quite vital as goal(s) vary depending on the system boundaries. Next step is listing available services and possible outcomes which might result in the end. Listing outcomes is very useful to select proper metrics and workload. Selecting parameters, evaluation technique and workload comes next in criteria of performance evaluation. Afterwards, the sequence of experiments should be decided that offer maximum output with minimal effort. Finally, designed experiments are analyzed and the results are interpreted using statistical methods and reporting techniques. Problem Definition There are several web performance testing tools that are currently in use, which run on different platforms. Namely, Iperf, httperf, opensta, uperf and jperf could be listed as some of the most used tools. Most of these tools allow the analyst to generate various kinds of workload by varying set of workload parameters. This synthetically generated workload can be applied on a web application to evaluate its performance.

3 Most of the above mentioned tools are console based and the generated output is text based. Processing such text based raw form of data is a hectic task and it needs the use of some other tools. Then again the difficulties arise if the analyst wishes to perform a statistical analysis and show results in a graphical form of representation which is much understandable. In this case the analyst will have to use statistical analysis tools and some reporting tools separately. In order for the analyst to integrate these separate tools it may take couple of additional steps and s/he will need to have good skills in programming. There might be a case where the analyst wants to repeat tests with so-called console based tools by varying certain parameters, where, s/he will have to write another set of programs to execute repetitions. Consequently, the performance analyst will have to put more effort on integrating set of tools together than in his main role of designing and performing experiments and analyzing the results. Though there are some tools that provide a certain level of user friendly interfaces and reporting capabilities the flexibility in designing and performing a range of tests is limited. The outline of the problem is that, though there are so many tools separately for characterizing workloads, generating workloads, conducting tests, and analyzing data, it s quite difficult to find any flexible framework which makes them work together. Even though there are some frameworks there is less or no flexibility in test designing and reporting. The tests available are predefined by the tool vendors and the analyst has no idea about the underlying process. In some frameworks graphs/reports are also predefined and the analyst has no control in representing data the way s/he desires. Analysts are not allowed to repeat the same test several times because most of these frameworks perform single test at a time. Furthermore these tools are not freely available. Therefore we propose to design an open source framework which facilitates the performance analysts in almost all steps of a systematic performance evaluation approach where the analyst gets a better flexibility and freedom to design and conduct performance experiments.

4 Project Objective The objective is to provide a user friendly all-in-one interface where test designing, test execution and statistical analysis can be achieved within a single framework. Users are provided with facilities to specify various parameters of the tests, input various values for the parameters, view and process the outputs, statistically analyze and graphically represent results. Most of the web application performance test tools do is web server testing. Therefore the proposed design will have the ability to identify server and application bottlenecks as well. Methodology Our approach is to search and analyze existing performance testing tools for workload generation, test designing, test execution, data analysis and reporting. Then the most suitable and compatible set of tools are selected in order to integrate them to achieve our project objective. Performance testing involves monitoring the system while it is being subjected to a particular workload. In order to perform a momentous measurement, workload becomes the most crucial part. Workload characterization engages studying the real-user environment, observe the key characteristics and develop a workload model that can be used repeatedly and it consists of characterizing a typical user or workload component. Generation of workloads for a particular test is programmed according to the above characterization. Since the performance do depend upon more than one factor such as system and workload, proper analysis needs to isolate each factor to get a meaningful conclusion. Possibility of applying some standard experimental design will be explored. These techniques will help the analysts to obtain the measurements or simulation experiments that need to be conducted with effective number of combinations of the parameter values thus reducing costs and drawing meaningful conclusions.

5 Scope Performance testing frameworks such as WebServer Stress Tool do not allow the analyst to design the test rather it allows to perform few predefined tests on web application and get the performance information. Tools like httperf allow more flexible test designing. So we aim to develop a flexible framework which facilitate comprehensive test designing on a web application. Also this framework provides as many facilities as possible that an analyst may need for various kinds of tests such as load tests, stress tests, sensitivity tests, volume tests and tuning cycle tests. This framework will help the analyst to design tests according to his predefined test objectives without being restricted by the limitations of existing tools, execute them, analyze the results and report the way he wants. However, our attempt is not to automate the process of performance analyzing but to facilitate the analysts to perform a web test in a very flexible manner with less effort. We are planning to implement this framework as a free and open source project. Resources Performance testing/statistical analyzing reporting tools Server Computers Language IDE s SVN

6 Time line Draft copy of the project schedule is shown here. Activity June July August September October November Preliminary research and gathering, project proposal Getting familiar with existing web testing tools, statistical analyzing tools and reporting tools and their functionalities specification design Design user interface System development Testing and debugging Deployment Report submission and final presentation

7 Activity December January February March April Preliminary research and gathering Getting familiar with existing web testing tools, statistical analyzing tools and reporting tools and their functionalities specification design Design user interface System development Testing and debugging Deployment Report submission and final presentation References 1. Raj Jain, The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis, Wiley Computer Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Web Application s Performance Testing

Web Application s Performance Testing B. Election Reddy (07305054) Guided by N. L. Sarda April 13, 2008 1 Contents 1 Introduction 4 2 Objectives 4 3 Performance Indicators 5 4 Types of Performance Testing