How to write Performance Test for .Net application?

Question

How to write Performance Test for .Net application? Does nUnit or any other Testing framework provides framework for this?

Edit: I have to measure performance of WCF Service.

Answer 1

NUnit provides you with a framework for unit testing: i.e. testing your code in discrete "units" so that you can, amongst other things, be aware when new changes break existing code, or that you have provided a certain level of code coverage. But it does not provide performance testing per se.

For that, you will need another type of tool. If you have a webapp, you might like to take a look at The Grinder or others to be found here:

http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php

Answer 2

Performance testing differs from Unit Testing. Typically you are looking at how your applications performs under load. There are various tools you can use:

• Webload (You want to look at the professional version) Commercial
• LoadRunner Commercial
• Grinder Open Source

If you don't want to spend too much money, I suggest The Grinder. You script performance-testing scripts in Jython. It's a little involved, but flexible. It's weak point is reporting; there are not very many good reporting tools.

Answer 3

VS Team System has built in performance testing modules. Worth exploring if u have licence for that.

Answer 4

If you are interested in relative performance of methods and algorithms, you can use the System.Diagnostic.StopWatch class in your NUnit tests to write assertions about how long certain methods take.

In the simple example below, the primes class is instantiated with a [SetUp] method (not shown), as I'm interested in how long the generatePrimes method is taking, not the instantiation of my class, and I'm writing an assertion that this method should take less than 5 seconds. This isn't a very challenging assertion, but hopefully serves as an example of how you could do this.

    [Test]
    public void checkGeneratePrimesUpToTenMillion()
    {
        System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch timer = new System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch();
        timer.Start();
        long[] primeArray = primes.generatePrimes(10000000);
        timer.Stop();
        Assert.AreEqual(664579, primeArray.Length, "Should be 664,579 primes below ten million");
        int elapsedSeconds = timer.Elapsed.Seconds;
        Console.Write("Time in seconds to generate primes up to ten million: " + elapsedSeconds);
        bool ExecutionTimeLessThanFiveSeconds = (elapsedSeconds < 5);
        Assert.IsTrue(ExecutionTimeLessThanFiveSeconds, "Should take less than five seconds");
    }

Answer 5

I came across NTime which looks cool for writing performance Tests.

http://www.codeproject.com/kb/dotnet/NTime.aspx