Topic: Network Sensitivity Tests.....

Message

   Network sensitivity tests are variations on Load Tests and Performance Tests that focus on the Wide Area Network (WAN) limitations and network activity (eg. traffic, latency, error rates...).  Network sensitivity tests can be used to predict the impact of a given WAN segment or traffic profile on various applications that are bandwidth dependant.  Network issues often arise at low levels of concurrency over low bandwidth WAN segments.  Very 'chatty' applications can appear to be more prone to response time degradation under certain conditions than other applications that actually use more bandwidth.  For example, some applications may degrade to unacceptable levels of response time when a certain pattern of network traffic uses 50% of available bandwidth, while other applications are virtually un-changed in response time even with 85% of available bandwidth consumed elsewhere.

This is a particularly important test for deployment of a time critical application over a WAN.

Also, some front end systems such as web servers, need to work much harder with 'dirty' communications compared with the clean communications encountered on a high speed LAN in an isolated load and performance testing environment.

Why execute Network Sensitivity Tests:
The three principle reasons for executing Network Sensitivity tests are as follows:
bullet     Determine the impact on response time of a WAN link.  (Variation of a Performance Test)
bullet     Determine the capacity of a system based on a given WAN link. (Variation of a Load Test)
bullet     Determine the impact on the system under test that is under 'dirty' communications load. (Variation of a Load Test)

Execution of performance and load tests for analysis of network sensitivity require test system configuration to emulate a WAN.  Once a WAN link has been configured, performance and load tests conducted will become Network Sensitivity Tests.

There are two ways of configuring such tests.

Use a simulated WAN 
and inject appropriate background traffic.

This can be achieved by putting back to back routers between a load generator and the system under test.   The routers can be configured to allow the required level of bandwidth, and instead of connecting to a real WAN, they connect directly through to each other.

When back to back routers are configured to be part of a test, they will basically limit the bandwidth.  If the test is to be more realistic, then additional traffic will need to be applied to the routers.

This can be achieved by a web server at one end of the link serving pages and another load generator generating requests.  It is important that the mix of traffic is realistic.  For example, a few continuous file transfers may impact response time in a different way to a large number of small transmissions.

By forcing extra more traffic over the simulated WAN link, the latency will increase and some packet loss may even occur.  While this is much more realistic than testing over a high speed LAN, it does not take into account many features of a congested WAN such as out of sequence packets. 

Use the WAN emulation facility within 
LoadRunner.

The WAN emulation facility within LoadRunner supports a variety of WAN scenarios.   Each load generator can be assigned a number of WAN emulation parameters, such as error rates and latency.  WAN parameters can be set individually, or WAN link types can be selected from a list of pre-set configurations.  For detailed information on WAN emulation within LoadRunner


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