LoadComplete generates in-depth reports with key load testing metrics that illustrate the performance of your Web applications. You can view these reports in the Report panel of the load testing log.
This topic describes the most important load testing metrics that help you estimate whether your Web application’s performance corresponds to the desired performance objectives.
Response Time
Response time is the time spent by the server on responding to a request. The response time is important for your web application’s success. The faster a web application communicates with a server the better it is for users and business.
Response time practically does not change with the low rate of growth and linearly grows from the low load to the massive load. Once the load on the server becomes excessive, the response time immediately increases.
LoadComplete enables you to see how the server response time changes when the number of users changes. You can find this information on the Response Time page of the Report panel. This page contains graphs that show the following metrics:
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Page Load Time - The time spent to download the complete web page including all images, scripts, CSS files, and so on.
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Time to First Byte - The time to receive the first byte from the server.
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Time to Last Byte - The time to receive the last byte from the server.
Using these graphs, you can determine how the response time changes while the workload is growing and whether your Web application meets the service quality requirements.
Request Throughput
Request throughput is the amount of data that can be transferred by your application per second. It is one of the most important metrics affecting the performance of a web application.
First of all, the amount of data transferred per second depends on the number of users. So, it is important that the throughput be maximized or kept at the desired level with the load growth.
In LoadComplete, you can measure the request throughput during the test run. You can view this metric on the Graphs page during the test run. On this page, you can see how the request throughput depends on the workload. By analyzing the provided data, you can learn whether the desired application performance is achieved.
Resource Utilization
To analyze your web application performance, it is also essential that you control resource usage (processor, memory, network I/O, disk I/O) on the server. Resource utilization should be below the utilization threshold limits set for your application.
LoadComplete lets you collect various resource utilization metrics during the test run. For more information on them, see Load Testing: Measuring Server Hardware Performance. You can select the most important of these metrics and add them to monitoring tasks. For more information on how to do this, see Managing Server-Side Performance Counters.
After the test run is over, you can view graphs for the desired resource usage metrics in the Server Monitoring section of the Report panel. The graphs let you evaluate resource utilization versus user load. For example, if you notice that you do not reach the specified threshold for resources, you can continue to increase the load.
Server Specific Metrics
To identify potential problems that can limit the application’s performance, you also need to monitor server metrics. The set of metrics you need to capture depends on the server type. For example, to analyze the performance of tested ASP.NET applications, you can use one set of metrics while to estimate the database server performance, you need to use another set. For more information on this, see the following topics:
Testing ASP.NET Applications - Specific Server Metrics
Measuring SQL Server Performance
You can monitor server metrics during the test run using the Graphs page. To analyze the metrics after the test run is over, use the Server Monitoring section of the Report panel.