Webservices and performance

Question

The application under test consumes webservices from a third party sometimes the requests are served immediately in a sec but sometimes it takes more than 3 seconds how do we bench mark our application as the thirdparty webservice is causing the delay.

Answer 1

We have run into situations like this too. The way we have worked around it is to break testing down into two segments. The first segment avoids areas of the application where the web service is used (login, account information, shopping cart, etc). The second segment does include with the web service (credit card check, central stock availability, part number look ups, etc). We know what part of the application the pages hit so we create scripts and run tests against the first segment and get all our data and benchmarks. We then create scripts and run tests against the second segment. With e-Load we can see how long individual pages take to complete so we can enforce our SLA with the web service provider with our own internal tests and log files. If you can break your testing down this way you should be able to pinpoint the slow portions of the application.