Perform Scalability test of Web Services

[Jack Wright]

Dear All,
We have developed a WinForm application that calls WebServices for
all database transactions. We would like to perform a scalability test
of our WebServices (under IIS 6.0 Windows 20003 Server, .Net 1.1 sp1).
Is there any white paper that will guide us to perform scalability
test and arrive at a figure (requests/sec) the number of users after
which we will have to have another Web Server.
Are there good books that guide us to these figures and optimisation?

Please help...

TALIA

Many regards
Jack

 

[Tomas Restrepo \(MVP\)]

Jack,

We have developed a WinForm application that calls WebServices for
all database transactions. We would like to perform a scalability test
of our WebServices (under IIS 6.0 Windows 20003 Server, .Net 1.1 sp1).
Is there any white paper that will guide us to perform scalability
test and arrive at a figure (requests/sec) the number of users after
which we will have to have another Web Server.
Are there good books that guide us to these figures and optimisation?

I've done this in the past by using Application Center Test to generate sets
of SOAP calls to the webservice from a set of predefined data (in my case,
we created the test cases and pulled the input data from a database).

 

[Jack Wright]

Thanks Tomas,
Is this the best tool for getting Scalability figures? What about
Mercury Load Runner? Is there any other tool too? Please help.

Thanks & Regards
Jack

 

[Tomas Restrepo \(MVP\)]

Jack,

Is this the best tool for getting Scalability figures?

Well, it's very likely not the best, but it certainly does work.

What about
Mercury Load Runner? Is there any other tool too? Please help.

I'm sure you can probably coerce any web load generation tool into using it
for webservices as long as you can customize the request sent and you're not
using something like WS-Security. As for the best, I'm afraid I don't know,
since I haven't been on the lookout for a webservice-specific tool; mostly
because what ACT does has been more than enough for me (I'm used to creating
custom db-driven ACT scripts for this purpose, so that was not much of a
problem for me).