SO, HOW MUCH CAN YOUR FARM REALLY HANDLE? Patrick Curran, MCT SPSBaltimore 05/18/2013

Planet Technologies  Founded in 1998  Microsoft Partner with Five Gold Competencies, 11 Silver Competencies  One of only 35 Microsoft Nationally Managed Partners  Six Time Microsoft Federal Partner of the Year and Three Time Microsoft SLG Partner of the Year  Highly Skilled Staff – Microsoft Certified Masters – Microsoft MVP’s (SharePoint, Exchange) – Microsoft Certified Trainers – Microsoft Certified Partner for Learning Solutions (CPLS) – 130+ Microsoft Consultants  Office Locations – DC, Denver, Harrisburg, Redmond, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA)  Vertical Markets include Federal, State and Local Government, Education, Healthcare and Private Sector  Work Experience in 42 States and 33 Countries

Patrick Curran Blog: New Book! Director, Federal Group for Planet Technologies SharePoint Architect Worked with SharePoint since 2003 MCT, MCTS, MCITP, MCP

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Agenda Why Validate?ULS Log Monitoring Using Developer Dashboard Using IE Dev Tools Reviewing IIS Logs Performance Testing Load Testing Stress TestingQ & A

What is REALLY Important?  Farm happiness! Are your ULS logs filling up with errors?  Requests per second! If you do not know how your farm is being used, how do you know if your farm is built correctly?  Baseline numbers! Getting the Out of The Box numbers on page load times, IOPS, throughput, SQL query execution, just about anything that you can record so you can measure changes instead of guess that your changes are positive.

Why Validate???  Do you really trust your network? 1ms is not a long time for communication between servers…  Is your farm functioning correctly? Is the farm performance within expectations? Do you want your farm to go down then find out that you have issues?  How will a test group of users validate performance? Load and stress testing cannot be done by people, regardless of how stressful they are!

Upgrading???  Really? Why?  You have the ability to get real world utilization figures before you architect out your new environment!  Ability to stand up your new farm and Load and Stress test your new environment with real numbers!

Not Upgrading???  You still have the ability to get real world utilization figures!  Stand up a new test farm that matches your production environment.  DO NOT PERFORM LOAD AND STRESS TESTING ON YOUR LIVE PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT! (you have been warned!)

ULS Logs ULS Logs ULS Logs  After you have created your farm, verify your farm happiness through the ULS Logs.  After farm goes into production, still monitor your ULS Logs.  When troubleshooting issues, start with your ULS Logs…  Download Microsoft ULS Viewer from:

ULS Logs ULS Logs ULS Logs Setting up Microsoft ULS Viewer

IIS Logs  Verify IIS Log Settings  Install Log Parser  Install Log Parser Studio

IIS Logs Reviewing IIS Logs and LPS

Developer Dashboard  Easy way to monitor page load issues.  Shows ULS log entries for that page.  Now has SQL tab to show SQL queries Returns query run times!  Requires Usage and Health Data Collection Service.  Log your baseline numbers! M

Developer Dashboard Enable: $svc = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService $dds = $svc.DeveloperDashboardSettings $dds.DisplayLevel = "On" $dds.Update() Disable: $svc = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService $dds = $svc.DeveloperDashboardSettings $dds.DisplayLevel = “Off" $dds.Update() M

Developer Dashboard M Reviewing the Developer Dashboard

Performance Testing  Makes the user experience better because they wait less to get content!  Reduce bottle necks  Need Many Test Plans What is the goal of the test? ○ Document upload speed? ○ Homepage rendering time?  RECORD YOUR BASELINE NUMBERS!

Performance Testing  Every request that you send has a standard set of processes that it goes through. The Timings window will be a very useful tool when you are trying to fine-tune your page load performance. Wait This is the amount of time spent in a sending queue. There are only so many connections allowed by a browser into one domain at the same time. Start This is the amount of time it took to create the request and send it. Request Also known as time to first byte, this is the amount of time taken from when you send the request to the first byte returned by the web server. Response This is the time taken to receive the response data from the server. It would be the time from the first byte returned to the last byte of the web server response to your request. Gap This is a critical number. It is the amount of time taken between the response and when the page is finished loading. DOMContentLoaded This is represented by a green vertical line. The DOMContentLoaded event is the same as document.interactive, which means that JavaScript can now run on the page. DOM stands for Document Object Model Load In IE Dev Tools, this is represented by a red vertical line. Load is the amount of time taken to finish your page load from start to page load finish.

Performance Testing Tools  Visual Round Trip Analyzer (VRTA) ○ ○ Requires NetMon  Internet Explorer Developer Tools (IE Dev Tools)  Fiddler ○  Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate  How Microsoft cleaned up their files on page load for SharePoint.Microsoft.com “How we did it: Speeding up SharePoint.Microsoft.com” ○

Performance Testing Page Load Performance Test

Load Testing  How user experience affects server operations.  Done to determine the highest level of utilization without server error AND stays within defined parameters.  Determine the number of RPS that your environment can handle while staying within the green zone, and the RPS your environment can handle before entering the red zone.

Load Test Standards  RPS The number of requests received by a farm or web server in one second. RPS is an industry standard used for determining server and farm utilization and load.  Total user count The maximum number of people that are accessing your site. This number could be the total number of unique users in AD.  Peak concurrent user percentage What the highest percentage of total users actively surfing your site at any given time. This could be when everyone gets in on Monday, after having their coffee….  Green zone The performance envelope that your servers should be within while load tests are underway, or during normal business utilization. Server Latency (Avg. Response Time): < 0.5 second. CPU Utilization (% Processor Time): 50 percent or less. This will allow for spikes in the farm caused by services such as Search Crawls and User Profile Synchronization and leave you enough headroom in CPU utilization before you enter the red zone.  Available Memory (Available Mbytes): > 4GB.  Red zone Would be the acceptable peak for system performance. This is an area that your server can spike into momentarily, as to not create an adverse experience for the user or do permanent damage to the server itself. (Yes, this is a bit overly dramatic, but consider yourself warned.) Server Latency (Avg. Response Time): > 1.0 second. CPU Utilization (% Processor Time): 75 percent or less. Available Memory (Available Mbytes): < 2GB. Average Page Load Time (Avg. Page Time): > 3.0 seconds

Load Testing Scenarios 1 2 3

Requests Per Second Determine requests per second (RPS)

Maximum RPS

Load Testing Page Load Load Testing

Stress Testing  The purpose of stress testing is to try to overwhelm the server farm resources (or even the network or NLB).  stress testing your environment is to not just about knowing where things break, but how they will break and how they will recover.

Stress Testing Environment Stress Testing

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