perftest/

Deep Root-Cause Performance Analysis: Integration and Navigation from a Load Testing Tool

2008 IBM Faculty Award Project

[Summary] [People] [Artifacts] [Presentations] [Education] [Related] [Sponsor]

PROJECT SUMMARY

Load testing tools such as IBM Rational Performance Tester can measure client-side response time and correlate it with collected application transaction monitoring data. Such correlation can break down client-side response time into its constituent parts on the various tiers of the server(s) under test. To avoid high overhead, some other tools can perform runtime profiling of CPU and memory usage by using JVM profiling with statistical sampling. However, such an imprecise profiling mechanism poses challenges for performance analysis. It is challenging to identify the correlation between a transaction or time-range (typically associated with different workload levels) on the client side and the profiling information at a server's JVM. Therefore, it is difficult to provide user-friendly drill-down navigation from client-side response time or time-range to determine problem spots and bottlenecks in the JVM(s) on the server sides because of a lack of correlation between the transactions or time-range driven by a load testing tool at the client side and the runtime sample data collected by the JVM profiling tools at the server sides. This project is developing new techniques and tools to help address the preceding issues in deep root-cause performance analysis.

PEOPLE

Faculty

Tao Xie (Principal Investigator)

Graduate Student

Yoonki Song (Ph.D. Student)

Past Graduate Student

Nuo Li (Ph.D. student)

Collaborators

IBM Rational Performance Tester Group (Kent Siefkes, David Chadwick, Joseph Toomey, et al.)

PROJECT ARTIFACTS

• Tips and lessons learned in installing, configuring, and using IBM RPT
• Milestone activity report (December 2008)

PRESENTATIONS

• Tao Xie. Deep Root-Cause Performance Analysis: Integration and Navigation from a Load Testing Tool. Talk, IBM University Day, October 24, 2008.

EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES

• David Chadwick. IBM Rational Performance Testing Process. Guest lecture, CSC 712 Graduate Course: Software Testing and Reliability, November 12, 2008
• IBM Rational Performance Tester available at NCSU VCL as image of RPT v2 (WinXP) for students of CSC 712 Graduate Course: Software Testing and Reliability

RELATED SOFTWARE & MATERIALS

• IBM Rational Performance Tester
  • IBM Redbook on Using Rational Performance Tester Version 7
  • Using IBM Rational Performance Tester: Application Monitoring Part 1, Configuring your environment
  • Using IBM Rational Performance Tester: Application Monitoring Part 2, Enabling real-time monitoring
  • Using IBM Rational Performance Tester: Application monitoring, Part 3: Importing data from IBM Tivoli database products
  • Add ARM performance monitoring easily with Eclipse
• Performance Analysis and Software Testing Research at IBM Research
  • IBM Jinsight
  • IBM Researchers: Gary S. Sevitsky Nick Mitchell Amit M Paradkar
• Open Source Tools
  • Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform Project
    • Profiling J2SE 5.0 based applications using Eclipse TPTP
  • Eclipse Modeling Framework Project (EMF)
  • Open source performance testing tools
• Profiling Tools
  • JVMTI
    • JVMTI Demonstration Code
  • YourKit
• Other Commercial Tools
  • HP LoadRunner
  • HP WinRunnerhttp://www-304.ibm.com/jct01005c/university/scholars/facultyawards/index.html
  • Load testing tools
• Other Performance Testing Materials
  • patterns & practices Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications (video clips)

SPONSOR

2008 IBM Faculty Award