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loadrunner

Virtual Table Server in LoadRunner

I am working on performance testing of an asynchronous application and is required to store the execution data. I came to know about the availability of Virtual Table Server component in LoadRunner. Could you please provide the below clarifications.

  1. What is the underlying storage structure of the VTS table (ie.. like proprietary files / DB etc)
  2. If the VTS uses DB can we modify the DB it can use in background.
  3. What is the performance of the DB if we keep on inserting the data into table. We have a plan of using the VTS where the script creates 6600 records per day. Please note that the script runs Monday through Saturday for monitoring performance of application.
  4. Is it possible to perform archive and purge? if so how to schedule such activity on VTS.
  5. What are the performance and capacity issue that need to be considered while implementing script using VTS.
Solution

  • VTS is designed for test use, not production use. You need a different queuing mechanism. May I suggest one of the following:

    • RabbitMQ
    • Amazon Simple Queue Service
    • A queue table on a traditional relational database server

    Given your volume I would heartily suggest an examination of the simple queue service on Amazon. Given your volume you will probably live in the free tier forever. While the volume of 6600 records per day is not an issue for VTS, the management pieces you seek for production use are not present. RabbitMQ qill have a lot of the production features you need and you could potentially deploy it inside of a free tier VM on Amazon, other cloud provider or inside of your own network.

    I also want to make note of the queue tables available on Microsoft SQl Server. Why do I note these versus ORACLE, because SQL Server is quite promiscuous on the number of interfaces it supports, from classical dblib, to odbc, to oledb, even via web services. This can make for quite the elegant solution which can be incorporated into your monitoring scripts running in HP Application Performance Manager (HP APM). This is also going to be far more robust from a management perspective, which you need on an operational basis, than VTS, which is a tactical solution for performance testing.