Benchmark Runner

Benchmark Runner allows you to create custom load test scenarios that simulate behavior of your database application, execute them from hundreds of virtual user sessions and measure client-side response time as well as impact of the application on the database server resources and overall performance.

You can also use the Benchmark Runner to analyze performance of your database applications before and after you change the database server's configuration settings. For example, after some changes in the server configuration, the performance of OLTP applications can improve but performance of the decision support applications can decrease. Benchmark Runner scenario allows you to create a consistent performance benchmark test for all kind of transactions and run this test after each configuration change to see the performance impact.

The Benchmark Runner load test scenario consists of multiple user-defined tasks. Each task is an SQL script that can include one or multiple SQL statements. Each task can be executed from one or multiple simultaneous virtual user sessions, using random or fixed interval between executions. Benchmark Runner calculates average, minimum and maximum execution time for each task, permitting you to profile and analyze response times based on the number of user sessions performing the same operations. You can also use Server Studio JE's Monitors to measure the performance on the target IDS under the load that these tasks create on the server's resources, such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, lock consumption, etc.

For example, to test an application that includes a data entry operation, such as placing a sales order and data query operation, or sales reporting, you can create a scenario consisting of two tasks. The first task consisting of a script that performs sequential data entry operations that are a part of sales order transaction and the second task consisting of an SQL script with all statements required for data reporting. Subsequently, you can specify that the first task is to be executed by fifty users at random interval from 5 seconds to 30 seconds and the second task is to be executed by three users at random interval between 1 minute and 5 minutes. After running this load test scenario for a period of time and monitoring the server parameters, using user-defined monitors described in the Monitors section, you will see how well your application performs under real-life stress conditions, measure all the performance characteristics and see if there are possible lock contentions between order entry and reporting activities.