PerfExt: Performance Extrapolation Tool

Load testing of IT applications is fraught with the challenges of time to market, quality of results, high cost of commercial tools, and accurately representing production like scenarios. It would help IT projects to be able to test with a small number of users and extrapolate to scenarios with much larger number of users. This in turn will cut down cycle times and costs and allow for a variety of extrapolations closer to production. We present Perf Ext, a performance extrapolation tool that uses a statistical empirical modeling technique to extrapolate application performance for a large number of users. The tool provides more than 90% accuracy for a range of applications running across a number of hardware servers. The tool allows performance extrapolation of applications with multiple transactions and its performance is compared with that of MVA.