Programming Jakarta Struts

Testing the Storefront Application

The Storefront application represents a typical shopping-cart application that you might encounter on the Internet or may even have built before. A normal application of this type would connect to a database with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of records.

Tip

By default, the Storefront application uses a debug implementation and doesn’t connect to a database. This was done so you didn’t have to have a database installed just to run the example application.

There’s no real point in going through the entire exercise of testing the Storefront application; the numbers wouldn’t mean anything anyway. It would, however, be helpful to show how to get started and what steps must usually be taken to get performance numbers out of an application. The following are the general steps:

1. Understand the performance goals.

2. Establish the performance baselines for the application.

3. Run tests to collect performance data.

4. Analyze the data to detect where the problems are.

5. Make the necessary software and hardware changes to increase performance.

6. Repeat Steps 3 through 5 as necessary to reach the performance goals.

This section works through each of these steps. For this exercise, we are going to use a scaled-down version of the Mercury Interactive LoadRunner product, called Astra LoadTest. This is a feature-rich commercial product. A demo version that will support up to 10 virtual users is available for download at http://www-svca.mercuryinteractive.com/products/downloads.html ...