Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Selecting the Stress Test Tool
Chapter 9: Capacity Planning 223
Several tools on the market allow users to perform load simulation. In this book, the
Microsoft Application Center Test (ACT) tool will be used to generate the tests, as it
is available as part of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and it allows you to generate load
tests and create reports. If you would like to perform more advanced load simulation
work, you will have to purchase third-party solutions such as LoadRunner, as
these solutions have been designed to meet more advanced requirements.
Web Application Stress Tool
The Microsoft Web Application Stress tool is not recommended for testing the performance
of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 portal sites, as it cannot handle many
ASP.NET-related features, such as handling view states. This is why it will not be
used for the load simulation of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 portal sites, although
it still can be a useful tool for testing traditional ASP Web applications.
Application Center Test
ACT is designed to stress test Web servers and to analyze performance and scalability
problems with Web applications. ACT can simulate a large group of users by
opening multiple connections to the server and rapidly sending HTTP requests. ACT
ships with the Enterprise Edition of Visual Studio .NET. Unfortunately, ACT does not
have some advanced features that the Web Application Stress tool has, such as the
ability to string multiple computers together to perform one large stress test. Each
computer running ACT must perform its own test, and if you want to produce a
large test, you must run ACT individually on many computers and manually aggregate
the results. Figure 9-5 shows what the user interface of ACT looks like.
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Figure 9-5 The ACT user interface