Automate web app profiling

Woland

Hi, i'm really impressed with your product but there is one thing that it seem to miss - the automated load script for profiling web applications or a hook to existing processes.

Right now when profiling starts i have to manually click different links in the web browser and then close it to get details. The problem is when i optimized the code it's kinda hard for me to see how the code actually improved as in order to do that i have to do exactly the same (clicks) as i did during initial test, which is sometimes pretty hard thing to do.

Is there anyway to integrate it with for instance Microsoft ACT web stress tool?

Brian Donahue

Hello,

Absolutely! If you choose to profile a web application, then it doesn't matter if the incoming requests are generated by ANTS Profiler's web browser instance or a third-party load testing tool. It would be possible to start an ASP .NET profiling session, then use ACT or ANTS Load to make requests to the web application.

Woland

I tried that, using ACT and it didn't work. Only the events generated by browser opened by the Profiler generated events.

I will try that again.

Brian Donahue

I'd be willing to bet that it's because of a viewstate problem! With ASP .NET, you need to make sure that the viewstate is consistent by doing a GET operation to a web form before posting to it. It's something that's easy to forget to do.

If the viewstate for the page is not correct, none of the methods on the page will be run because an HTTP/500 error will happen.

Woland

No, the ACT test ran without problems. Profiler just didn't record any values.

Brian Donahue

Hello,

Are there any 500 errors in the W3SVC logs when this test was run? I'm not 100% on ACT, so I don't know if it recognizes error pages properly or if it just says 'yup--I sent a request and got a response' even if the response was an error page.

Brian Donahue

Hi,

I take that back -- ACT does report errors. I've just had a look at it.

Well, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't trigger results in ANTS Profiler. I'll have a look at this today/tomorrow and get back to you. There must be some sort of gotcha in ACT that is making this (not) happen.

Woland

Yeah ACT does capture the errors. I ran it again and it didn't profile anything, well actually profiler never opened the results like it does when you do it with one browser opened by default. It just continued to display the start page.

Brian Donahue

Hello,

I've done a few tests with ACT and got it to work perfectly. Here's what I did:

• Record a test with ACT (one get to default, one get to a form, one post to a form)
• Start ANTS Profiler - tell it to profile the same web app as the one I generated the ACT test against
• Let Profiler load the main page into IE (don't think this matters much)
• Went back to ACT and ran the test script.
• Click Snapshot in ANTS Profiler (note -- the STOP button will not yield any results!!)
• Checked out one of the methods on the form I POSTed to in the test in the ANTS Profiler report. The count was in the hundreds.