performance testing of a road tolling system · testing of web services • webservice mocking...

Performance Testing of a Road Tolling System

Oliver BaendlSiegfried Goeschl

1Donnerstag, 27. September 12

Gauteng Open Road TollingSouth Africa

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42 Tolling Points3Donnerstag, 27. September 12

1.500.000 registered road-user4Donnerstag, 27. September 12

11 Satellite Centers5Donnerstag, 27. September 12

41 E-Toll Shops

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20 Mobile Payment Units7Donnerstag, 27. September 12

Central Operation Center8Donnerstag, 27. September 12

750 Concurrent CRM Client Users

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162 vehicle passges per second10Donnerstag, 27. September 12

400 concurrent web users11Donnerstag, 27. September 12

Two Data Centers

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Master Control Program

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Project Overview

• Vehicles are passing through a tolling point

• The vehicle is identified either using the license plate number (via OCR) or a tag

• Vehicle passage are transmitted to Open Road Tolling Back Office (ORTBO)

• 90% video passages with three images

• 10% tag passages

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Project Overview

• Vehicle passages are collected and assigned to road-user accounts in the Transaction Clearing House (TCH)

• TCH responsible for billing the customer

• Passages of unregistered or black-listed cars are processed by the Violation Processing Center (VPC)

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Project Overview

• Overall system contains multiple Oracle RACs and MSSQL clusters

• Interfaces between the subsystems mostly web services

• Backup data center replicates the “Central Operation Center” over dark fiber

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Schedule Phase One

• Performance testing of CRM Server simulating 771 concurrent & active CRM client sessions

• Performance testing of public-facing web portal simulating 400 concurrent & active web user sessions

• On success the CRM subsystem goes live and has real user accounts

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Schedule Phase Two

• Simulating up to 162 vehicle passage per second

• Validating the end-to-end processing under load (passage processing, customer billing and violation processing)

• On success the overall system goes live

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Performance Test Scope

• End to end performance acceptance test

• Mandatory and client-witnessed test

• Strict acceptance criteria regarding

‣ throughput

‣ number and severity of errors

‣ validation of test runs

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Performance Test Types

Baseline Test One hour average load

Stress Test One hour peak load

Endurance Test 24 hours maximum load

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Performance Test Hardware

• Six dedicated load injectors

‣ Windows 2008 Server

‣ 3 physical and 3 virtual boxes

‣ Dual quad-cores with 8 GB RAM

• No direct access outside the data center

‣ Citrix over RDP over RDP

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Performance Test Tools• All performance test tools have issues

‣ Make sure that they work for you

• We prefer JVM-based test tools

‣ Easy to migrate between different OS

‣ We are Java developers

• We prefer command-line invocation

‣ RDP over slow network is really slow

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Performance Test Tools

• We use a non-distributed installation

‣ Complex network and routing

‣ Firewall not under our control

• Check the license and price tags

‣ Virtual users can be expensive

‣ Connectivity to license server?

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The Test Tools We Used

Subsystem Interface Planned Delivered

CRM Server WebService

Public Web Portal HTML

Vehicle PassageProcessing WebService

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Apache JMeter

• Open Source and free

• Implemented a new reporting backend to scope with huge result files

• Rock solid - only minor issues

• Extensible using scripting and Java libraries

• Rough GUI compared to commercial tools

• Unsuitable for complex ASP.NET web sites

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WAPT Pro

• Excellent value for money

• Good support

• ASP.NET module saved my day

• Extensible through Javascript

• One major issue with generation of test values under high load (requires restart)

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soapUI Pro

• Excellent for prototyping and functional testing of web services

• WebService mocking saved my day

• Extensible using Groovy and Java libraries

• Various issues during load testing

• soapUI was replaced with JMeter for performance tests

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• No software installation

• Take two (or more)

• Automation is your friend

• Performance test for everyone

• Performance tests are a valuable asset

Some More Thoughts

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No Software Installation

• Portable Apps on USB Stick

‣ Run tests directly from USB Stick

‣ Clone USB Stick to hard disk

• Have all your tools on the USB stick

‣ Java, JMeter, Editor, Git, ...

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Take Two (or more)

• A minimum of two share-nothing load injectors are required to prove that the production servers is causing the performance bottleneck (and not your test tool)

• We used a maximum of five share-nothing load injectors simultaneously

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• Performance test were run mostly at night and over the weekend

• Test execution managed by Hudson

• Test failures triggers email notification

• Test protocols are copied to FTP server

Automation Is Your Friend

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Performance Tests for Everyone

• All test scenarios are configured as Hudson jobs

‣ Baseline, stress & endurance test

‣ Some other internal tests

• Everyone can start and monitor a performance test scenario over the web browser

• Even developers can run performance tests

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• Performance tests can be used in creative and un-planned ways

‣ Smoke test for new deployment

‣ Testing database failover

‣ Testing data center replication & failover

‣ Testing different database setups

Performance Tests as Asset

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The few things you should take home

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Lessons Learned

• Tests tools are buggy

• Client-witnessed test are hard

• Performance tests are a valuable asset

• Creation and maintenance of complex performance test suite is a project on its own

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Questions & Answers

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Resources

JMeter SLA Report https://github.com/sgoeschl/jmeter-sla-report

JAMon API http://jamonapi.sourceforge.net/

JMeter ANT Tasks http://www.programmerplanet.org/pages/projects/jmeter-ant-task.php

WAPT Pro http://www.loadtestingtool.com

soapUI http://www.soapui.org/

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