What is IBM Rational Performance Tester?

What is a Rational Performance Tester?

- The Rational Performance Tester was developed by IBM to make the performance testing automated so that quality software could be delivered to the end users. 

- The performance tester is a great way to accelerate the performance of a software system or application without degrading its quality and this is what that matters the most. 

- This is a performance testing tool that has been developed exclusively for the identification of the cause as well as the presence of the software performance bottlenecks. 

- Using this tool, the testers can validate the scalability factor of most of the server and web based applications. 

- Further, it can be very well used for the creation of the tests in a code free style i.e., the need of programming knowledge is eliminated. 

- The test editor of this tool is quite rich in features and using it one can both the detailed and high level view of the performance tests. 

- The test data variation is automated here which means that the custom java code can be inserted possibly for making the test customization more flexible. 

- With the rational performance tester the emulation of the user populations which are quite diverse in nature is possible. 

- Also, it provides you options for flexible modeling at the same reducing the processor and memory foot print.

- If any error is found, it is reported in the real time so that the performance problem can be recognized immediately. 

- The report is presented in the form of HTML web pages in the application window itself. 

- This tool collects server resource data and integrates it with the real time performance data from the application. 

- You can even perform load testing against a number of applications such as:

1. HTTP
2. SAP
3. Sieble
4. SIP
5. TCP socket
6. Citrix and so on.

- It works well on all the windows platforms plus Linux and z/OS. 

- The performance tests can be quickly executed. 

- You can determine what impact the load is having on your software system and application.

- The below mentioned are the basic features of the rational performance tester:

1. Code free testing
2. Root cause analysis tool: It helps you to dig out the root cause and diagnose it.
3. Real time reporting
4. Test data: It reduces the headache of generating the test data by providing you options for generating it from the scripts and data pools etc.

- It comes with a recording frame work which supports the recording of the tests consisting of a SOCKS or HTTP proxy, and service tests along with the socket recorder. 

- You have the privilege of making selections among the Firefox profiles that already exist. 

- Furthermore, it comes with a protocol traffic graph which gives a real time display of the amount of data that has been recorded. 

- There is a test annotation tool bar consisting of support for all the protocols and screen capture annotations. 

- With rational performance tester, it is possible to copy and paste the page elements in the HTTP tests. 

- The data correlation tools can be customized and written using the rules editor. 

- The automatic data correlation can be disabled either fully or partially. 

- All the references in a test can be viewed through a global view. 

- Now a wider variety of conditions can be implemented using the content verification points. 

- The fractional percentages are supported by the user groups. 

- Actions to be taken and messages to be logged can be specified for a particular condition in the case of error handling. 

- Reports can be made more presentable with the help of the custom verification points. 

- Java virtual machines can be used for collecting the resource monitoring data.