This page is aimed at users who want to test the performance of their VuFind installation. If you are a developer interested in testing functionality of code changes, please see the unit_tests page instead.

There are two main components in VuFind installations that may influence performance:

• Solr (including Solr settings and hardware Solr is running on)
• VuFind (including the environment (Apache, PHP settings) and hardware is is running on)

Performance tests may be run with either of those as a target.

Some VuFind libraries have used JMeter to test the limits of their installations. The following articles were recommended by Franck Borel to help new users set up and automate a test plan:

• JMeter Distributed Testing Step by Step (pdf)
• JMeter Ant Task

The free WCAT (Web Capacity Analysis Tool) from Microsoft uses a Windows machine to generate requests against a target server. Although originally designed for use with IIS, it can easily be used to test any web server. This can be a useful way of generating load on a VuFind server and examining how the server performs.

Obtain WCAT: 32-bit download, 64-bit download

This configuration accesses random record pages and does searches for random numbers (record views and one-term searches are most common, but two- and three-term searches are also possible). By using random numbers as search terms, the test is constantly exercising Solr to find new terms; a search for hard-coded words would not realistically test performance since caching would allow unrealistically fast results.

Note: You may need to replace /vufind with a different base path if your VuFind installation lives in a different directory of your web server.

Note: If you are running VuFind under SSL, change “secure = false” to “secure = true” in all the transactions.

scenario
{
	warmup = 1;
	duration = 120;
	cooldown = 20;
	transaction
	{
		id = "onesearch";
		weight = 1000;
		request
		{
			url = "/vufind/Search/Results?lookfor=" + rand("1", "1000000");
			secure = false;
		}
	}

	transaction
	{
		id = "twosearch";
		weight = 500;
		request
		{
			url = "/vufind/Search/Results?lookfor=" + rand("1", "1000000") + "%20" + rand("1", "1000000");
			secure = false;
		}
	}

	transaction
	{
		id = "threesearch";
		weight = 100;
		request
		{
			url = "/vufind/Search/Results?lookfor=" + rand("1", "1000000") + "%20" + rand("1", "1000000") + "%20" + rand("1", "1000000");
			secure = false;
		}
	}

	transaction
	{
		id = "record";
		weight = 1000;
		request
		{
			url = "/vufind/Record/" + rand("1", "1000000");
			secure = false;
		}
	}
}

This configuration allows WCAT to simulate 15 simultaneous users.

settings
{
	virtualclients = 15;
}

This is the most basic procedure for running WCAT:

• Open two Windows command prompts in Administrator mode.
• In both Windows, switch (“cd”) to the directory containing WCAT.
• Make sure your scenario.txt and settings.txt files are present in the directory.
• In the first window, run this command to start the WCAT controller:

wcctl -s myserver.myuniversity.edu -t scenario.txt -f settings.txt -c 1

• In the second window, run this command to start the WCAT client:

wcclient localhost

You can use more complex configuration/switches to access more advanced features, like controlling multiple WCAT clients, logging output to a file, etc.

Testing Scenario: Open-JDK 1.7, Solr 4, 23GB index with ~8.8 million records.

JMeter, 400 threads (single source), 40000 single-word queries, each from a randomly pre-sorted CSV word dictionary. Download: solr_kln_00.jmx (dictionary not included)

Note: These are all single runs, so each datapoint may vary greatly.