Performance testing of a Sitecore website

Question

My client gave me a Sitecore website to do some performance testing.I really don't have any expirence with Sitecore website or Sitecore itself (which I am working on now).I have some idea of performance testing of a website and also got additional info from stackflow. But I am curious to know if there is any difference in testing a Sitecore website? What is the best practice to test a Sitecore website? Little bit about the performance testing scope:

1. The website handles different kind of enrollment path for students. So there are a couple of enrollment paths , all of which ends with a payment done by the customer.There can be more than 1 student enrolling at a time (like 6 together). Performance testing will include enrollments for all of these paths.
2. A lot of customers trying to enroll at the same time in the same enrollment path and different enrollment paths.
3. Also have to keep in mind that since this is a customer facing website the images/texts/files that are hosted in Sitecore should be shown in the website quite quickly.

Any help is appreciated.Thanks!

Answer 1

Typically there are three ways to come at perforamce testing for Sitecore.

The first is that it's basically just a web application, so most tools you'd use to test those are valid. Load testing tools like jMeter (or Windows equivalents) that simulate requests to pages and measure response times can give you an idea of how your Sitecore application works under load. Or the developer tools in browsers can show you how long individual requests take, and what resources are being downloaded. Both can help you form a picture of the site's overall performance levels.

The second is that Sitecore includes some tools for measuring how hard Sitecore itself is working to render pages. The "Experience Editor" (the WYSIWYG view for editing web page content) has a "debug" mode which can tell you how many content items are being read to render a page, what UI components are being run and how long these things are taking. This can help you tweak how code queries Sitecore's databases, and how components are cached in order to increase performance.

Thirdly, any ASP.Net application can have low-level performance tracing done with standard .Net tools. Visual Studio's performance tracing tools, or 3rd party stuff like dotTrace can all give you a detailed view of how long IIS spends working on individual pages, and what parts of the code are taking the most time or memory.

I wrote up a user-group presentation I did on this topic a while back:

https://jermdavis.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/measure-if-you-want-to-go-faster/

and more recently I wrote about some general patterns you might see when doing low-level performance traces:

https://jermdavis.wordpress.com/2018/02/05/spotting-common-challenges-when-youre-doing-performance-tracing/

Answer 2

Sitecore is basically a .NET-based content management system so there should not be any difference from other web applications performance testing so the same approach applies.

The best entry-level document I've seen over the web so far is Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, you can quickly get familiarized with the concept of load testing, how to implement it, what metrics need to be considered, etc.

With regards to load testing tool, the most natural choice would be Microsoft Visual Studio Load Testing Framework, however it assumes having a relevant license and some C# coding skills. If you don't have any of these you can consider one of free and open source load testing tools.

While creating your script keep in mind that each virtual user needs to represent real user as close as possible so mind cookies, headers, cache, think times, distribution of virtual user groups, etc.