CloudTest Videos

You can find some good videos on SOASTA CloudTest here. Some of them could have been made better.

http://cloudlink.soasta.com/t5/CloudTest-Videos/bg-p/CloudTest_Videos

Performance Testing of MQ with Load Runner

Many a times we want to post some x messages/sec to an MQ using loadrunner and wonder if there is an easy way to do this. Over the net you will find a lot of articles but I will limit it to the basic steps to successfully do this.

The key for successfully doing this is to know your MQ. Rest is all easy. This post will cover the testing of Websphere MQ using web services license on a Windows Controller machine.

Steps:

• Download and install the IBM Websphere MQ client on the Controller machine OR LoadGenerator. Click on Setup.exe and follow the instructions.

• After installation, go to C:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\WebSphere MQ\java\bin provided you chose the default path for install. Edit JMSAdmin.config. The only changes I made in the file are given below for reference. 
• INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY=com.sun.jndi.fscontext.RefFSContextFactory
• PROVIDER_URL=file:/C:/JNDI

• Now we need to provide all the queue level information you know and create a .scp file. I have created one called myfile.scp. The contents from the file I created is pasted below. Make sure that you check with development team and find the right port, channel name, queue name & queue manager name. Unless you get the right it will not work.

DEFINE QCF(QueueConnectionFactory) QMGR(MYOWNQUEUEMGR) tran(client) chan(PROVIDECHANNELNAME) host(Hostname or IP here) port(1414 or OTHER PORT)
DISPLAY QCF(QueueConnectionFactory)
DEFINE Q(MYOWNQUEUE) QUEUE(MYOWNQUEUE) QMGR(MYOWNQUEUEMGR)
DISPLAY Q(MYOWNQUEUE)
end

•  Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\WebSphere MQ\java\bin & execute the command as shown below

This will create a .bindings file in the C:\JNDI directory. The verbose output of the above command is given below.

• Now we need to make the following run time settings change to our web services vugen script.
• Change JNDI initial context factory to “com.sun.jndi.fscontext.RefFSContextFactory”
• Change JNDI provider URL to “file:/C:/JNDI”
• Change JMS connection factory to “QueueConnectionFactory” and click OK

• Now create a script and all should work. Check the queue depth and if the listeners are stopped, you should see an increase in depth. 

Cron Schedule

Sometimes you just cannot avoid cron....I just had to write a schedule for some alerting of suspicious activity.

Providing link to a good article explaining how to schedule tasks using cron tab.

• http://kvz.io/blog/2007/07/29/schedule-tasks-on-linux-using-crontab/ 

Usability, Richness and Performance

Through this article I will be covering the Usability, Richness and Performance aspects of the mobile websites of some major retail companies in the US. I will limit myself to mobile version of the home page of these sites.

The sites I am planning to cover are taken from the -  Keynote Performance Index: Mobile Commerce (Retail) – US - Week Ending 7 April 2013 . These are arranged from the fastest to the slowest.

Rank	Retailer	Score (out of 1,000)*	Load Time (in seconds)	Success Rate (percentage)
1	Barnes & Noble	950	4.43	99.87
2	Grainger	842	4.26	99.50
3	HSN	838	6.84	99.75
4	Office Depot	831	4.70	99.51
5	Toolfetch.com	812	2.84	99.26
6	Amazon.com	800	6.75	99.62
7	J.C. Penney	782	8.70	99.75
8	PetSmart	758	8.31	99.64
9	Target	745	8.62	99.63
10	American Eagle Outfitters	741	11.23	99.87
11	Sears	696	2.89	98.88
12	Walgreens	694	6.51	99.25
13	Dick's Sporting Goods	692	12.83	99.87
14	Walmart.com	650	7.96	99.25
15	Rakuten Shopping	649	7.58	99.20

To be continued...

Browser Metrics - WebPagetest & Gomez & CatchPoint & others....

Most of us will be using some monitoring tool to measure the website performance. For example we have 2 sites to monitor and we want to compare how Site 1 did with respect to Site 2.

Here comes the world of monitoring tools. There are a lot of them and I am going to mention few of the key ones.

• WebPageTest - This is a free version and quite popular
• Keynote
• Gomez
• CatchPoint.
• 
  

The above ones are also quite popular but they are not free and usually in use by large companies to have a record of their website performance, alert them in case of issues etc. I have been using CatchPoint lately and like the interface, support and features.

Now coming back to browser metrics. To keep it simple, I will start with a few and then keep on adding to this post. Will use the metrics provided by WebPageTest as this is widely used and free. See the example from a test I ran on WebPageTest.org. It is always a good practice to run at least 5 tests to find the data you are looking for. Some documentation can be found here webpagetest-metrics

• OnLoad event - This is an event fired by the browser when it has loaded all the static contents. Onload waits on images too. The ready event occurs after the HTML document has been loaded, while the onload event occurs later, when all content (e.g. images) also has been loaded. 
• Document complete is when the OnLoad event has been fired.
• Fully Loaded - Usually after static content/main page has been loaded, javascript will cause to load some more (dynamic) content.. Suppose after dynamic content has been loaded there is no network activity for ~2 seconds, then it can be considered that the WebPage has been fully loaded. In calculating the fully loaded time, this 2 seconds is not included though. The measurement is till the point of the last network activity before this 2 seconds of no network activity.