New SharePoint 2010 Load Test Toolkit Released

The SharePoint team released the Administration Toolkit for SharePoint 2010 (SPAT2010).

One part of this toolkit is a great new load testing kit for 2010.

The toolkit was initially developed by the SharePoint product team’s perf testing team, and then made available publicly.

SharePoint is a real challenge to do performance testing against (or any test automation for that matter), since both field names and values contain GUIDs. Large SharePoint deployments can contain 1000s of SharePoint sites, so how can you effectively test this? If you only hit the same site over and over it could have a very different performance characteristic than if you spread load across all the sites. And typically some sites are much busier and more popular than other sites.

The load test toolkit handles both of these problems really well. It is particularly targeted initially at migrating a site from 2007 to 2010, and does a great job by reading the IIS log to get site distribution, and by then dynamically determining during a load test which sites to hit. For example, if the load test is testing actions against a document library, a web test plugin will go to the SharePoint site to dynamically select an appropriate document library to target, and then cache the url to the library on the load client. This is a brilliant way to solve both the distribution and parameterization problems. Hats off to Demetrious and Kfir on the SharePoint team for developing the solution, and James and Doron for making it available to customers.

Ed.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2010
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  November 18, 2011
  Are any thorough examples on how to use the app out there?