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Showing posts from June, 2009

Load Testing ASP.NET Sites with JMeter

Following my previous post about using JMeter to test MOSS, I tried to figure out what are the bare minimum requirements of using JMeter against a plain ASP.NET website. I wrote a very simple ASP.NET web application with just a button, a text fields and a static label. This application displays the content of a text file in the static label when it loads and write content of the text field back to the file when the button is clicked. I found all I need to do in order to script this using JMeter is to extract __VIEWSTATE and __EVENTVALIDATION fields then send them back in the update request. My JMeter test plain looks like this:

Load Testing SharePoint (MOSS) Sites with JMeter

I have used JMeter for load testing few non-ASP.NET web sites before, however I could not get it to work with ASP.NET web sites. This is mainly due to ASP.NET ViewState and event validations, which stops a recorded JMeter script from being played back. Recently I worked on a MOSS project and we were looking for tools to perform load testing on the server. Many people said the load testing tool in Microsoft Team System for Testers works well with MOSS. However, it is quite expensive so I decided to give JMeter another go. After several hours of hacking, I actually got it to work and here’s how I did it. My test page is the pretty standard MOSS edit document property screen with few extra text fields added and the goal here is to use a JMeter script to change the document properties. Once I have a working script, I can configure JMeter to fire hundreds of instances of this script simultaneously to simulate the user workload. As shown in the screenshot below, the test plan contai

Installing VMware Server 2.0.1 on Ubuntu 9.04

I use Ubuntu on daily basis and I can live without Windows most of the time. However, once in a while I need to use Windows for things like accessing the iTunes store and editing Microsoft Word documents (yes I know OpenOffice.org works but it messes up the style from time to time). I created a WIndows VM image under VirtualBox, which worked quite well except that I noticed the constant high CPU load as mentioned by several other users . I tried their suggestions such as using nohz=off and turn off ACPI, which did reduce the CPU load to 50% on one core but didn't get rid of the problem completely. I eventually decided to give the free VMware Server a try. Setting it up on Windows was pretty simple, just double click and then click through the Wizard. However, installing it on Ubuntu 9.04 is a non-trivial task and took me a little while to complete. Launch Synaptic package manager and make sure you have linux-header, linux-source, gcc and binutils installed. Download the .tar