Why is important to measure Transaction Response Time?
By defining an initial acceptable response time, we can benchmark the application if it is performing as anticipated.
What does Transaction Response Time encompass?
- Processing time on Web Server
- Processing time on Application Server
- Processing time on Database Server
- Network latency between the servers, and the client
Figure 1
Factoring the time taken for the data to return to the client.
Measuring of the Transaction Response Time begins when the defined transaction makes a request to the application. From here, till the transaction completes before proceeding with the next subsequent request (in terms of transaction), the time is been measured and will stop when the transaction completes.
Differences with Hits Per Seconds
Hits per Seconds measures the number of “hits” made to a web server. These “hits” could be a request made to the web server for data or graphics. However, this counter does not represent well to users on how well their applications is performing as it measures the number of times the web server is being accessed.
How can we use Transaction Response Time to analyze performance issue?
Transaction Response Time allows us to identify abnormalities when performance issues surface. This will be represented as slow response of the transaction, which differs significantly (or slightly) from the average of the Transaction Response Time.
With this, we can further drill down by correlation using other measurements such as the number of virtual users that is accessing the application at the point of time and the system-related metrics (e.g. CPU Utilization) to identify the root cause.
Bringing all the data that have been collected during the load test, we can correlate the measurements to find trends and bottlenecks between the response time, the amount of load that was generated and the payload of all the components of the application.
How is it beneficial to the Project Team?
Using Transaction Response Time, Project Team can better relate to their users using transactions as a form of language protocol that their users can comprehend. Users will be able to know that transactions (or business processes) are performing at an acceptable level in terms of time.
Users may be unable to understand the meaning of CPU utilization or Memory usage and thus using a common language of time is ideal to convey performance-related issues.
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Labels: LoadRunner, transaction, transaction response time




Good Post.Any idea how can I check Time taken by webserver to process say 100 requests made at same point of time using loadrunner.