Visual Studio Hacks

Stress Test Web Applications #79

Chapter 10, Work with Visual Studio Tools

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HACK

HACK

#79

Stress Test Web Applications Hack #79

You’ll never be able to perform a decent test with one mouse and one

keyboard. Use the Application Center Test tool to simulate legions of users.

The focus of this hack is to use ACT from within Visual Stu-

dio. In many cases, it’s preferable to use the ACT tool in its

standalone version, so that will be discussed toward the end

of this hack.

Like all good web developers, we want to know whether our applications

perform well. Does our design and implementation hold up to the expected

load levels? Are we seeing the right amount of throughput? How many con-

current users can we handle? How many requests per second can the web

application deliver? Will we see memory leaks after a certain amount of

time?

These are all valid questions when it comes to performance testing. Of

course, there are many other questions, but most of them come when the

performance metrics start to get collected and analyzed. In many cases, per-

formance testing occurs too late in the development process. This is in large

part due to time constraints; performance testing is put off until toward the

end of an application life cycle, when it’s too late to do anything about it.

To do some performance testing on web applications early in the develop-

ment cycle, developers can use the Microsoft Application ...