HP Analysis Tips and Tricks

In this article you are going to learn about HP Analysis Tips and Tricks. Reporting plays an important role in performance engineering and testing. Instead of raw data or table, if you present the details with graphs and charts attracts the technical and business audience. No one cares about the numbers with decimals, all they need is whether the transactions met SLA objectives or not.

When I am reporting the load or stress test results, I found that the maximum response time were not equal to 100 percentile. Ideally 100 percentile is nothing but maximum response time. But in HP Analysis report, there was a mismatch.

What’s the catch here? What I did was after loading the results directly from HP Performance Center, I started generating the report for 95 and 100 percentile. Actually in the background complete data was still loading. You can identify that by the status bar as shown in below.

Once it has reached 100%, I recreated the summary report for 95 and 100 percentile. Now there is match between maximum and 100 percentile response time. By default Display summary while generating complete data is enabled in HP Analysis.

Did you know? HP Analysis works only on x86 platforms. If the transaction name contains ‘@ or comma characters, then you can find the discrepancy in the test results with the existing transactions. So do not use @ or comma characters in your transaction names. Also by defaults Include Think Time is disabled in HP Analysis.

Also, it is best to avoid Microsoft Word format while generating the report because the table structure might have an impact. Always try to use RTF format.

If your results have lots of measurements then it is recommended to set maximum memory for 32 bit and at least 4 GB for 64 bit systems.

If you notice the Transaction Response time (percentile) has inaccurate results, then open the <HPLoadRunner_Folder>\bin\dat\percentile.def file and set the following variable to empty under [Graph Definitions] section and then re-launch the Analysis application:

[Graph Definitions]

BasicTableName=