Automated performance analysis of load tests

The goal of a load test is to uncover functional and per-formance problems of a system under load. Performance problems refer to the situations where a system suffers from unexpectedly high response time or low throughput. It is difficult to detect performance problems in a load test due to the absence of formally-defined performance objectives and the large amount of data that must be examined. In this paper, we present an approach which automati-cally analyzes the execution logs of a load test for perfor-mance problems. We first derive the system’s performance baseline from previous runs. Then we perform an in-depth performance comparison against the derived performance baseline. Case studies show that our approach produces few false alarms (with a precision of 77%) and scales well to large industrial systems. 1