• Article

Run a Project Server 2010 performance test lab

 

Applies to: Project Server 2010

Topic Last Modified: 2011-03-11

Running a performance test lab against a Microsoft Project Server 2010 solution can be a very complex task, due to the various user interactions and system behaviors involved. This section of articles is designed as a general guide for creating and running such a performance test lab.

Types of load

The following are the main types of load that we typically have to reproduce in a performance test environment.

  1. User-initiated operations involving Microsoft Project Web App

  2. User-initiated operations involving Microsoft Project Professional

  3. Background operations

Testing strategies

Testing strategies can include independent loads or mixed loads composed of different operations. Measuring how the systems react to the load produced by a single specific operation by many simulated users at the same time can help determine a reference measure for peak periods of that specific operation. But mixed load strategies are more realistic and can be used to simulate how the systems react to several possible usage patterns. For example, if you are concerned about the timesheet submission load, which according to your specific scenario has a peak period on Friday afternoon for all users. You can then test the system by simulating timesheet submissions only, without any other simulated load. These results will provide a reference baseline as measured by maximum throughput (for example, how many timesheets can be submitted/processed per hour) of the system for the particular operation under investigation.

You may also want to test the system under a wider set of different operations at the same time. You could use usage profiles as similar as possible to your real scenario, ideally using historical logs coming from the production system, as a data source to determine the usage profiles to be tested.

Regardless of the overall testing strategies you want to adopt, the related articles listed in the "See Also" section describe in more detail how to plan and simulate the load types that belong to the three categories that were discussed earlier. Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition provides the foundation for all the scenarios. By using Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition, you can easily balance multiple load types in one single load test to run for a given period of time.

Please send any comments, questions, or concerns about the documentation to epmdocfeedback@microsoft.com.