How to create a Web Performance Test for SharePoint 2013 using VS 2013 Update 1 – Part II!

In this article I will continue talking about how to create a Web Performance Test for SharePoint 2013 using Visual Studio 2013 (VS 2013) Update 1 in a SharePoint 2013 CloudShare environment. If you remember, in my last post about this topic I explained how easy is to define and create a Web Performance Test in VS 2013 Update 1. In this blog post, we will see how to execute an existing Web Test and also the performance information provided by the IDE.

• Go back to VS 2013, open your Web Test project so the “Web Performance Test Editor” is shown. Through the menu options available in the Test Editor, execute the test by clicking the “Run Test” option.

• VS 2013 opens a new tab where you can see how the Web Test is being executed by the IDE. The Web Test execution tab displays very useful information about the operations being done behind the scenes:
  • The web requests that have been done. For each web request, you can see additional information such as the request status ( Note: A 200 OK code means that everything is fine when calling the specific SharePoint resource), the request time, the total time for the request, etc.
  • For each web request we can obtain detailed information such as the request parameters, the response gotten, context information, etc.

• Once the Web Test execution finishes, check throught the web browser that the Test has done all the recorded actions. In this case, we can see that there are two new files uploaded to the document library in the SharePoint site.

• Now, it’s time to review the information generated by VS 2013 in the Web Test execution. As you can see in the Web Test Results tab, for each web request done by the Web Test, you have four different information tabs: Web Browser, Request, Response, Content and Details. The “Request” tab shows detailed information about a specific web request in terms of headers, query string parameters, etc. “Response” tab displays details about the response sent back by the server in terms of headers and HTML code.

• “Context” tab provides information about the execution context in the Web Test: the file directory where it’s stored the information generated by the Web Test execution, the name of the machine acting as controller ( Note: In this case, we have a single controller and a single agent test hosted in the same physical machine, i.e, our machine is performing both roles in our simple test architecture). Finally, the “Details” tab shows information about validation rules applied and the results obtained when they have being applied.

• Additionally to all this information, we have the possibility to do a deeper analysis for each web request done by the Web Test execution. For instance, we can determine all the request pool done in each single web request. Some of these requests are quite familiar and needed for the SharePoint user interface rendering process: CSS files and JavaScript libraries needed, etc.

• Finally, the “Test Results” section provides a series of useful buttons and controls action that allows to access to previous Web Test results execution, filter data in the current Web Test execution, do some debugging in the Web Test execution, etc.

• The access to previous Web Test execution it’s possible because VS 2013 stores the information of each Web Test execution in a TRX file and in a contents folder with all the data related to each particular Web Test execution.

And here comes the second post about creating Web Performance Tests with VS 2013 Update 1. In the next post we will see additional settings that can be made at the Web Test level. Happy CloudSharing!