Collaborative Lifecycle Management performance report: Rational Quality Manager 5.0 release

Introduction

This report compares the performance of Rational Quality Manager version 5.0 to the previous 4.0.6 release. The test objective is achieved in three steps:

• Run version 5.0 with standard 1-hour test using 1,000 concurrent users.
• Run version 4.0.6 with standard 1-hour test using 1,000 concurrent users.
• The test is run three time for each version and the resulting six tests are compared with each other. Three tests per version is used to get a more accurate picture since there are variations expected between runs.

Disclaimer

The information in this document is distributed AS IS. The use of this information or the implementation of any of these techniques is a customer responsibility and depends on the customer’s ability to evaluate and integrate them into the customer’s operational environment. While each item may have been reviewed by IBM for accuracy in a specific situation, there is no guarantee that the same or similar results will be obtained elsewhere. Customers attempting to adapt these techniques to their own environments do so at their own risk. Any pointers in this publication to external Web sites are provided for convenience only and do not in any manner serve as an endorsement of these Web sites. Any performance data contained in this document was determined in a controlled environment, and therefore, the results that may be obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly. Users of this document should verify the applicable data for their specific environment.

Performance is based on measurements and projections using standard IBM benchmarks in a controlled environment. The actual throughput or performance that any user will experience will vary depending upon many factors, including considerations such as the amount of multi-programming in the user’s job stream, the I/O configuration, the storage configuration, and the workload processed. Therefore, no assurance can be given that an individual user will achieve results similar to those stated here.

This testing was done as a way to compare and characterize the differences in performance between different versions of the product. The results shown here should thus be looked at as a comparison of the contrasting performance between different versions, and not as an absolute benchmark of performance.

What our tests measure

We use predominantly automated tooling such as Rational Performance Tester (RPT) to simulate a workload normally generated by client software such as the Eclipse client or web browsers. All response times listed are those measured by our automated tooling and not a client.

The diagram below describes at a very high level which aspects of the entire end-to-end experience (human end-user to server and back again) that our performance tests simulate. The tests described in this article simulate a large part of the end-to-end transaction as indicated. Performance tests include some simulation of browser rendering and network latency between the simulated browser client and the application server stack.

Findings

Performance goals

• Verify that there are no performance regressions between current release and prior release with 1,000 concurrent users using the workload described below.

Findings

• According to the testing results, some response times of the pages for 5.0 are degraded comparing to 4.0.6.
• Comparing nmon data for both 5.0 and 4.0.6 show
  • Similar memory utilization on application server and database server.
  • Similar disk utilization on database server.
  • Reduced disk utilization on application server in 5.0.
  • Higher CPU utilization on application server and database server in 5.0.

Topology

The topology under test is based on Standard Topology (E1) Enterprise - Distributed / Linux / DB2.

The specifications of machines under test are listed in the table below. Server tuning details listed in Appendix A

N/A: Not applicable. vCores = Cores with hyperthreading

Network connectivity

All server machines and test clients are located on the same subnet. The LAN has 1000 Mbps of maximum bandwidth and less than 0.3 ms latency in ping.

Data volume and shape

The artifacts were contained in one large project for a total of 579,142 artifacts.

The repository contained the following data:

• 50 test plans
• 30,000 test scripts
• 30,000 test cases
• 120,000 test case execution records
• 360,000 test case results
• 3,000 test suites
• 5,000 work items(defects)
• 200 test environments
• 600 test phases
• 30 build definitions
• 6,262 execution sequences
• 3,000 test suite execution records
• 15,000 test suite execution results
• 6,000 build records

• Database size = 15 GB
• QM index size = 1.3 GB

Methodology

Rational Performance Tester(RPT) was used to simulate the workload created using the web client. Each user completed a random use case from a set of available use cases. A Rational Performance Tester script is created for each use case. The scripts are organized by pages and each page represents a user action.

The work load is role based as each of the areas defined under sequence of actions which are separated into individual user groups within an RPT schedule. The settings of the RPT schedule is shown below:

User roles, test cases and workload characterization

User Roles

Test Cases

Response time comparison

The median response time provided more even results than the average response time. The nature of the high variance between tests where some tasks at time takes a longer time to run, such as when the server is under heavy load, makes the average response time less predictive. The median values are mainly included in the following tables and charts for comparison.

Summary

There are totally 91 pages which are under test in the performance runs. And the table below shows the summary of all the degradation pages whose response time are longer than in 4.0.6:

If we ignore the pages which response time are less than 1s and degradation percent are less than 20%, then we got the conclusion:

So some page performance degradations could be observed by users.

The numbers in the following charts include all of the pages for all of the scripts that ran.

Results

Resource utilization

Resource utilization for 5.0

	QM server	DB server
CPU
Disk
Memory

Garbage collection

Verbose garbage collection is enable to create the GC logs. The GC logs shows very little variation between runs. There is also no discernible difference between versions . Below is one example of the output from the GC log for each application.

QM

JTS

NOTE

For all usecase comparison charts, the unit is millisecond, and for the data, smaller is better.

Create Defect

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Create Test Plan

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Create Test Case

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Create Test Script

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Browse Test Plans & Test Cases

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Browse Test Scripts

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Bulk Edit of Test Cases

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Defect Search

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Defect Modify

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Edit Test Case

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Edit Test Environment

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Edit Test Plan

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Edit Test Script

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Full Text Search

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Simple Test Plan Copy

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Test Execution For 4 Steps

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Test Execution Record Browsing

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View Dashboard

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View Dashboard with Login

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Appendix A

-Dcom.ibm.team.jfs.app.http.client.dispatchingEnabled=true -Xss786K -Xgcpolicy:gencon -Xmx8g -Xms8g -Xmn2g -Xcompressedrefs -Xgc:preferredHeapBase=0x100000000 -verbose:gc -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -XX:+PrintHeapAtGC -Xverbosegclog:gc.log -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=1G

For more information

• Collaborative Lifecycle Management 2012 Sizing Report (Standard Topology E1)

About the authors

JeffPang

Questions and comments:

• What other performance information would you like to see here?
• Do you have performance scenarios to share?
• Do you have scenarios that are not addressed in documentation?
• Where are you having problems in performance?

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