Performance and scalability in Qlik Sense Enterprise

Performance and scalability testing is an important activity that should be practiced throughout the lifetime of a system. To facilitate such testing of Qlik product deployments, Qlik provides the Qlik Sense Enterprise Scalability Tools, which can be downloaded for free from Qlik Community.

Why run performance tests?

Performance and scalability tests can serve many different purposes. Typical reasons for running performance tests in Qlik Sense Enterprise product deployments include:

• Understanding performance

  You can run performance tests that replicate the current usage patterns to understand how your Qlik product deployment performs during a typical day or period.

• Understanding the performance impact of deploying a new app

  You can run performance tests with and without the new app to determine the impact of adding a new app in your Qlik Sense Enterprise product deployment. Comparing these test results helps you understand the performance impact of adding the app.

• Understanding the performance impact of modifying an existing app

  You can run performance tests with the app before and after it is modified to determine the impact of modifying an existing app. Comparing these test results helps you understand the performance impact of modifying the app.

• Resolving performance issues

  You can run tests using the apps with which users have experienced performance issues to identify and resolve the issues.

• Planning for future growth

  You can run performance tests that mimic anticipated usage patterns to identify where additional resources might be needed.

You need to consider your hardware environment, usage pattern and apps when planning your performance tests. These factors all affect the performance of a Qlik Sense Enterprise product deployment. For example, if you do not optimize your apps, they may require more hardware resources than necessary. The same goes for the performance impact of the anticipated usage pattern.

Qlik Sense Enterprise Scalability Tools

Qlik Sense Enterprise Scalability Tools include tools that help you to:

• Create and execute load and performance tests where you define sequences of actions that your users are likely to perform. You can then create and execute scenarios of parallel sequences to check resource consumption and identify the right application design.
• Compare and analyze differences in result sets produced by different versions of Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows.
• Perform hardware benchmarking to compare information about how Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows performs in different environments.
• Evaluate your apps before you deploy them into your production environment.
• Use pre-caching to create a cache of pre-calculated application selections. Fetching data from the cache is faster than having your users perform the calculations needed after a selection in real time.

• Make sure that your deployment is always available. By applying a low, constant workload, you can check that the deployment is up and running and that acceptable performance levels are maintained.

• Determine the robustness of your deployment by testing it beyond the limits of normal operation. Such stress testing is done much in the same way as a regular performance test, except that the purpose is to find the point where your deployment fails.

Qlik Sense Enterprise Scalability Tools

Scalability Results Analyzer

You can use Scalability Results Analyzer to analyze the performance test results from Qlik Sense Enterprise Scalability Tools.

Scalability Results Analyzer