Performance Testing

[ZackTurnbow]

Referencing http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/5-4/managing/conceptandplanning.html#Setting%2520Target%2520Metrics

Under the section of Performance > Setting Response Times, it mentions guidelines for page response times under controlled circumstances. I would like to know how those numbers where determined. I also would like to know what test/testing software is used to validate those numbers. I'm trying to determine is the CQ system that I inherited is configured and optimized correctly.

Thank you for your time.

[Gardner_Buchana]

The document reference is to the 5.4 version.  This is the current version of that documentation:

http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/managing/conceptandplanning.html

In both versions, the section Setting target response times describes the process of deciding what your performance goals are and how you will measure whether your system meets them.  The actual numbers in this section are made up for the purposes of example.  The numbers represent requirements that might be applied to a typical web application, irrespective of the technology -- you might look for performance characteristics of this type from an IIS/ASP.NET application, for example.  They are not meant to describe the actual performance of any particular CQ/AEM application.

If you are looking for guidance about the actual capacity or performance of a realistic CQ/AEM application, I would suggest looking at the following forum posting for links to that sort of information:

http://help-forums.adobe.com/content/adobeforums/en/experience-manager-forum/adobe-experience-manage...

[smacdonald2008]

This question was passed on to the CQ performance team. 

[ZackTurnbow]

Thank you for the quick reply. I have read most of those links already. I was hoping for a more explanation of how Adobe tests their own installations. I will find away that suits my needs.

[Gardner_Buchana · Accepted solution]

Performance, load and scalability testing of web applications is a pretty large subject area these days.  One good place to see what people do and talk to others doing application performance testing is SQA Forums, a popular Software testing and quality verification discussions site.

http://qaforums.com/

The most popular tools, industry wide, are probably

• Apache JMeter http://jmeter.apache.org/, and
• HP LoadRunner http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/software.html?compURI=1175451

There are many other options.

Within Adobe, we tend to use JMeter extensively for small projects and unit level testing, and a commercial load generation tools for public facing applications and larger more complex systems.  JMeter is very flexible for unit level automated tests as there is no licensing complexity, but JMeter's scenario capturing and editing is limited, as is its ability to do analysis and reporting of results.  Commercial tools we commonly use are HP LoadRunner as well as Borland SilkPerformer (http://www.borland.com/products/silkperformer/). Both of these have very powerful scenario editing, load modelling and analysis and reporting capabilities.