Analyze the Test Results

The data you capture will help you identify possible trouble spots in the system. The following are examples of things to look for in the baseline test results.

Compare the maximum authorization throughput of individual OpenSSO Enterprise instances with no load balancer in place.

If identical hardware is used in the test, the number of authorizations transactions per second should be roughly the same for each OpenSSO Enterprise instance. If there is a large variance in throughput, investigate why one server behaves differently than another.

Compare the maximum authorization throughput of individual OpenSSO Enterprise instances that have a load balancer in front of them.

Using a load balancer should not cause a decrease in the maximum throughput. In the example above, test 2 should yield results similar to test 1 results. If the maximum throughput numbers go down when a load balancer is added to the system, investigate why the load balancer introduces significant overhead. For example, you could conduct a further test with static pages through the load balancer.

Verify that the maximum throughput on a load balancer with two OpenSSO Enterprise instances is roughly twice the throughput on a load balancer with one OpenSSO Enterprise instance behind it.

If the throughput numbers do not increase proportionately with the number of OpenSSO Enterprise instances, you have not configured sticky load balancing properly. Users logged in to one OpenSSO Enterprise instance are being redirected to another instance for logout. You must correct the load balancer configuration. When sticky load balancing is properly configured, each OpenSSO Enterprise should serve requests independently and thus the system would scale near linearly. If the throughput numbers do not increase proportionately with the number of OpenSSO Enterprise instances, you have not configured sticky load balancing correctly. For related information, see Configuring Load Balancer 2 for OpenSSO Enterprise in Deployment Example: Single Sign-On, Load Balancing and Failover Using Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8.0.

Verify that for each test, the OpenSSO Enterprise transaction counts report indicates no unexpected OpenSSO Enterprise requests.

For example, if you perform the OpenSSO Enterprise login and logout test, your test results should look similar to this:

# cp access a; grep Login a|wc; grep naming a|wc; grep sesion a|wc; grep policy a|wc; grep jaxrpc a|wc; grep notifi a|wc; grep Logout a|wc;wc a; 1079 10790 94952 1032 10320 99072 1044 10440 101268 1064 10640 101080 0 0 0 0 0 0 1066 10660 97006 5312 53093 495052 a

This output indicates three pieces of information. First, the system processed 1079 login, 1032 naming, 1044 session, 1064 policy and 1066 logout requests. These numbers are roughly equal. For each login, there is one naming call, one session call (to validate the user's session), one policy call (to authorize the user's access) and one logout. Secondly, all other types of OpenSSO Enterprise requests were absent. This is expected. Lastly, the total number of request received 5312 is roughly the sum of login, naming, session, policy and logout requests. This indicates there are no unexpected requests that we didn't grep in the command.