Performance Tests against the SAP EP with "The Grinder"

[Former Member]

I'm working on a performance project to check the sap portal for performance issues. For that case I found the tool "The Grinder" on the net, which offers the possibility to do some load tests per http and https to a webserver. The tool was exspecially designed to check webbased java applications. Does somebody already have experience with that tool, which is open source? I appreciate all your hints, tips and experiences you got with that one.

<a href="http://grinder.sourceforge.net/">http://grinder.sourceforge.net/</a>

[former_member197561 · Accepted solution]

Hi Johannes,

SAP recommends for Load testing the HP LoadRunner tool, which supports all important protocols for SAP and as well meets the requirements of SAP for reliability of the testing results.

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/software.html?compURI=1175451

Any other open source or freeware Load testing tools were not deeply evaluated in SAP .

Best regards,

Sylvia

[Former Member]

For creating scripts you should use a browser sniffer to capture the real traffic between the client and server. Ensure the skiffer can save its results. Then when you test, use a tool that can capture all request/response and compare that with your sniffer. This will highlight differences that will point to why your script may not be working properly, as well as assure you that you are emulating real client behaviour.

Nick

[Former Member]

Hi Joerg,

thanks for your consideration. Yes I also thought about this issue. And surely no HTTP CLient will simulate a Browser completely.

Our conclussion later has been to take a open source tool to create a benchmark and to creat an monitoring environment. For this purpose the Grinder seems to be a tool which could support us.

The Grinder simulates Think Times and traces through a HTTPPROXY (TCPSniffer) the interaction (requests and responses) through the webbrowser. This is for creating the business cases. (like the Mercury Tool does)

After that you are able to distribute the business cases on different client machines and run them distributed.

As an result of such a test (one run) you are getting response times and deviations , bytes transfered for each GET request.

Established as an satalite system (one agent very near to the EP box, the other distributed around the world) you can monitor and do stress tests against the box (AND the network).

I got it to run also with the portal and the login pages. It is pretty nice and lowcost if somebody considers the million project with load runner.

If somebody has questions about this tool. Don't dare to ask

PS: Further more, the next step will be to combine THE GRINDER with SLAMED.COM (from sun). The grinder offers no monitoring agents, which SLAMED.COM does. Both are written in Java and could maybe interact.

[Former Member]

Johannes

I am also looking at The Grinder 3 but so far I cannot get it to work with the portal.

How did you create your scripts? I tried to use the proxy method (ie setting mty proxy to Localhost:8001) but the resulting script was incomplete.

Do you have an example of the script you use and also could you tell me how you created it?

Thanks

Patrick

[Former Member]

Hi Patrick I used the TCPProxy of the newest Grinder Vesion (3.0 29) to record the TCP activity.

What are you excatly missing in your script?

[joerg_nalik]

Hi Johannes,

I don't have experiences with "The Grinder" just a few consideration points:

- Does the grinder truly emulates a browser with all its features like browser caching, TCP/IP connection handling, compression and more? If not your results could be off some 100% from the truth.

- Is the tools usability good enough to be worth your time? Would you need a lot more worktime to use it compared to a professional tool like Mercury LoadRunner?

You might find more details to this subject at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/com.sap.km.cm.docs/documents/a1-8-4/how to perform sap enterprise portal load testing.zip

Kind Regards, Joerg