Silverlight Performance Testing

So it seems that alot of shops I run into as of late seem not to have done stress testing before... I know that this can't be the case normally but just in case I thought I would post something about pref testing silverlight.

With regard to Silverlight we need to break out pref into two areas. The abiltiy of the hosting infrastructure to server up component parts and do server side processing and then the how well the 'clientside' Silverlight application performs locally on any given client and browser combination. In most cases there would never ever be more then one instance of the application running side by side on any given client.

To do stress testing you can download something free like the MS Stress tool and record some nice test scripts and have a go at your server. Basically your hitting the box, filling informs and or clicking on links and the like and the tool uses that to simulate what your are doing but much faster to the point of failure on the server.

You can download the MS Stress Tool at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E2C0585A-062A-439E-A67D-75A89AA36495&displaylang=en

but there are a number of other tools such as :

http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

that basically do the same thing.

Anyway when it comes to testing the client it is a matter of having a Mac and PC and all the browsers installed and then opening it up and testing everything. If the silverlight application is following the best practices such as those listed in the last post then it should be good and you can track down anything else on individual testing.

With that you should be armed to start doing some Silverlight perf testing.