IBM Rational Performance Tester Reviews

This product is basically for performance testing of web applications and mobile applications. It is used for all sorts of performance and load testing. We are currently using its latest version.

It can support both web applications and mobile applications, and in certain cases, it can also support testing of desktop applications or software-based applications. You can write web applications, mobile applications, and software-based applications.

The most valuable aspects of the solution are the multiple technologic supports and the multiple integrations with other IBM tools from the same ecosystem. 

The way the solution was developed to build the components is very poor. 

They need to be able to integrate better overall. 

They don't have to change the architecture of the solution, but they need to adjust the development aspects to make it easier and more user-friendly for customers.

The tool supports multiple protocols, such as HTTP, Citrix, and SAP. It enables me, as a consultant, to run performance tests against the most common application environments.

I can manage the complete performance test process from a single interface, which saves me from installing additional software and swapping between applications.

Provides very good user workload modelling functionality, which is important for me to accurately represent real business scenarios when designing my tests.

Very easy to customize and edit tests once recorded with lots of features for renaming, merging, splitting pages, and data driving tests.

Load generation is supported from the cloud via a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, which removes the need for us to provide additional hardware resources and network bandwidth for large tests.

Resource monitoring of the system under test infrastructure is also supported. This enables me to correlate performance statistics with resource utilization figures during analysis.

It supports our agile approach not only philosophically but now practically in enabling us to provide performance testing “On Demand” and earlier in the development lifecycle.

This allowed us to act quickly on several occasions where it was crucial to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks with minimal delay.

Code extending capabilities are the most valuable features, however it requires Java coding skills, and is not for those who aren't coders or for those with basic knowledge.

As other load tests, this product allows production of effective load to the SUT. It can create scripts from the recording or allows to create scripts from direct coding.

• Automatic correlation and saving manual correlations and parameterization in a rule, so that it can be used for re-recording or subsequent flows. These features are big time saver.
• Easy to include Java classes and write code to manipulate or provide data getting generated at run time.
• It offers a good variety of reports to identify the presence and cause of performance bottlenecks. The reports provide the response time breakdown at the method level, which can be used to identify the cause of the bottleneck, by identifying slow performance classes, methods and individual lines of application source code

Saving the correlations in rule file and using this rule file, helped to automatically correlate dynamic values and thus reducing the script enhancing time and meeting the project schedules. Its built in root cause analysis tool helped to identify issues in codes. It also has good report formats and also provides variety of reports.

We mainly used it for load and stress tests for our application.

The valuable features are--

• test cases
• data pools, and
• logging features to see what went wrong during load run.

It's definitely helped in scaling the performance of our application.

Customization and extensions made in Java is valuable because this can help you set elements to improve your results. 

Additionally, it gives you the ability to have an editor where you can see requests and responses, and the way to correlate it. 

Lastly, the possibility to cross data with your servers measure points such as CPU percentage, disk I/O, paging, etc.

Once we we're doing performance testing for a new system developed in Java, and the people in charge of development wanted to deploy the application as soon as possible for contract requirements, and were proposing to deploy it without performance testing it to gain two weeks. 

We refused to do that and thankfully we did it, because during testing the server launched a CPU page fault error meaning one of the eight CPUs the sun blade had was defective, and needed to be replaced.

• Easy to create scripts if you are not a programmer
• Nice GUI feel
• Easy to maintain servers

Non-programmers can now create performance tests.