Performance of HP LoadRunner Agent Machines
Written by Meena on September 15, 2008 – 9:57 amDuring one of our tests the application caused the LoadRunner agent machines to run at full CPU. The agent machine CPUs status is diplayed on the HP LoadRunner Controller as below. If the CPU of the agents are above normal then the results of the tests are sure to be inaccurate.
The below image shows how the CPU of generators are within the safe limits of CPU usage before starting the test.
Below you see the CPU of the agents machine marked in Red as they cross 100% usage. This definitely makes the response times received during the load test to be much higher and hence the wrong results. So watch out for these signals during testing.
Tags: agents, Loadrunner
Posted in Performance Testing |
September 19th, 2008 at 6:40 am
Thanks for sharing the tip!
Does the icon gets marked directly in red or does it show another color code earlier to indicate a problem with the CPU usage of a load generator?
Additionally, does one need to do anything when few load generator CPU’s are overloaded or does LoadRunner’s load balancing take care of this problem automatically (since few other load generators are shown as idle in your second image)?
September 19th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Inder,
The icon can be seen changing from green to yellow and then finally red as it rises in the little bar as shown in the images above. As it rises we can see that the CPU is overloading.
LoadRunner usually manages to Load Balance very well and this kind of occurrence is quite rare. Yes, in this case I had to redistribute among all the available agents after getting into this issue.
November 13th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Great Post - One learns something new everyday. And this falls in that category
i guess we wont usually find this out till we break one of the generators.
How many users were you running and what protocol were they?
November 13th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
It was an application related issue and it was a flex application. Even manually one user was using 100% memory on every click. Once the app was fixed LoadRunner continued to work fine. It was more a find by fluke.