Squadron Quick Test in SharePoint

In this article we can explore the Quick Test plugin for Squadron.

What Squadron is

Squadron is a Free SharePoint Administration tool available at sharepointcto.



How to download Squadron

Squadron for SharePoint 2010 can be downloaded from the link below:

Squadron for SharePoint
 
Squadron is built on Click Once deployment, so installation is simple and automatic updates are possible.



After Installation

After installation we can run Squadron from the Start Menu.  In the startup screen enter the site URL and click the Quick Test link from the left pane.



Recommended Average Response Time

The recommended average response time for an intranet site is 3 seconds.  Anything less than 3 seconds would be acceptable in most cases, but ensuring that is good.

Test 1: Quick Test

Here we are giving an URL and continuously testing 5 times.  This quick test ensures there are no HTTP exceptions happening. The current logged in user token is passed to the web site.

I chose the following parameters:

1. All sub sites
2. Number of Tests as 5

After the selection click on the Quick Test button.



This test will send the HTTP requests continuously for 10 times.  Wait for a few seconds for the test to be finished.



You can see that there were 6 sub-sites and the average request time falls within the 3 second range. There were some exceptions, but considering the successes, the failure ratio was negligible.

Test 2: Threaded Test

Here multiple tests are passed to the server simultaneously. This quick test enables us to determine the number of simultaneous request processing capacity of the server.

Click on the Threaded Test button to start the multi-threaded test.



Wait for a few minutes and you can see the results.


 
You can see the overall result summary status is "Bad" denoting there are underlying issues when set for synchronous requests.

Clicking on each row of the grid, we can examine the test results.



You can further click on the Bad row to find the exception information.  In the above case the response time was above 5 seconds.

This concludes the quick test and threaded test scenarios.  Please note that the Testing machine should be different from the SharePoint server. (In my case both are on the same machine.)

Advanced Scenario

In the advanced testing scenario, I recommend the following:

1. A mock test environment with SharePoint Production Farm configuration (hardware and software) to simulate load and stress testing
2. Mock user accounts equal to our production load
3. Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate edition link
4. Isolation of test program from servers
5. Monitoring CPU/Memory/Hard disk graphs for the involved servers (front end, application server, database and so on)

HP Sizer Tool is a Good Capacity Tool for SharePoint.

References

http://www.sharepointcto.com/Squadron/Default.aspx 

Summary

In this article we have explored the Quick Test add-in for Squadron.  In the future, I will be adding a concurrent testing scenario as well.