Test multiple FM clients against server for stress test...

[Flarb]

Hello folks

Today I am tasked with showing performance metrics: We need to see how FileMaker Server responds to 300 users performing intensive tasks simultaneously. For example, finds, sorts, new record creation and so on. I have a test bed of scripts which loop and perform such tests, such as creating lots of records and populating them with dummy data, and so on. Now I just need to figure out a way to have 300 FileMaker clients perform these tests simultaneously so I can monitor server metrics. I do not have access to 300 real machines. 

The only case I can come up with is to use multiple Virtual Machines. Within each VM, runs a copy of FM14, FM14 Advanced, FM15, and FM15 Advanced. That is four quasi realish"clients" I can put to work running my intensive scripts simultaneously. And, ram permitting, I can have about ten such VMs, resulting in a total of 40 quasi-real client instances. Granted, this skews network latency, this is a known downside to this approach. But I need 300 anyway, not just 40, and I am out of hardware for testing. I am limited to a single Mac Pro with 128GB ram. Is there a different way to simulate 300 users performing my intensive scripts simultaneously? Do I ultimately need more hardware to create the simulation? 

[webko]

300 simultaneously? That would be very, very rare in the real world - even on systems I've run with 2000 users, no more that 30 or 40 were ever doing anything at the same time

Why don't you try it with the 40 first? I know that on most of the more complex systems I've worked on, that in itself will probably introduce performance issues that need to be looked at in any case...

[Wim Decorte]

On 10/7/2016 at 1:47 PM, Flarb said:

Hello folks

Today I am tasked with showing performance metrics: We need to see how FileMaker Server responds to 300 users performing intensive tasks simultaneously.  [ ...]  and I am out of hardware for testing. I am limited to a single Mac Pro with 128GB ram.

 

That's funny; you're given a task but not the tools to actually perform the task... start there and fix that.

I'll echo @webko you won't find any FM deployments in the wild with 300 concurrent users, unless it is a really complex deployment spread across multiple servers with server-to-server syncing.

Or unless it is a dead-simple file with no complexity to its design.

What's the background for the test?  Are you seriously considering having 300 concurrent users on the solution? 

[Flarb]

Thanks for the insight. The stakeholders claim to expect 300 concurrent users in the near future. Currently they're at 220 concurrent users, although "concurrent" truly means "idle 99% of the time" as you know.  Still, the stakeholders insist on setting up a test environment for some worst case scenarios. That would be 300 moderately active users. My approach, using a bunch of VMs, would take a lot of hardware, so thats why I was asking if there was another, a better way to simulate 300 from one machine. If my suggested method is in fact the only way, then I need to know it, so I can request X more computers. But I wanted to double check here, because in the web, java and SQL worlds, a tool can be run on just one single computer that'll accurately simulate 100x+. Any ideas to accomplish this for us FileMaker folks would be welcome. Let me know if by bad idea really is the only way. Many thanks!

[Wim Decorte]

There are no such tools in the FM realm.  A FM solution is very different beast than a web app or compiled app like Java or a db backend like SQL.