We are contracted to administrate and maintain an infrastructure that includes web-based services. Using Rational Performance Tester to capture and create ‘scripts’ to test those services allows our company to provide the client with SLA metrics that measure our performance. Also, the test can provide diagnostic indicators that can help point to issues with sub-services behind the web-based ‘curtain’ (i.e. file download, webmail, page loads, authentication, search, etc).

Non-programmers can now create performance tests.

It helps the testers quickly and efficiently record tests, and setup schedules (test suites).

The Rational Quality Manager adapter for Rational Performance Tester allows testers to manage, schedule, and execute their Rational Performance Tester assets from Rational Quality Manager.

Comprehensive Rational Performance Tester results allow testers to identify bottlenecks in the systems under test.

As other load tests, this product allows production of effective load to the SUT. It can create scripts from the recording or allows to create scripts from direct coding.

Saving the correlations in rule file and using this rule file, helped to automatically correlate dynamic values and thus reducing the script enhancing time and meeting the project schedules. Its built in root cause analysis tool helped to identify issues in codes. It also has good report formats and also provides variety of reports.

I found a couple of SQL bugs and discovered that when we used Rational Performance Tester the response time was longer than normal.

Once we we're doing performance testing for a new system developed in Java, and the people in charge of development wanted to deploy the application as soon as possible for contract requirements, and were proposing to deploy it without performance testing it to gain two weeks. 

We refused to do that and thankfully we did it, because during testing the server launched a CPU page fault error meaning one of the eight CPUs the sun blade had was defective, and needed to be replaced.

Like any other performance testing tool, this helped us to identify performance bottlenecks in the application prior to the go live. It also helped us to identify and pinpoint the issues in the applications code by using its inbuilt root cause analysis tools.

Helped in improving response times in a few of our transactions.

The handling of data correlations in the tool has helped us, and sped up our preparation of complex tests with a lot of security features, certificates, generally in enterprise environment. The tool supports Z/OS applications which is very important to our customers, as well.

It provides the option to collect real-time data using ITM monitoring agents.

It has improved our visibility of reporting and simplifying performance testing for larger projects/programs. Also, it is being used for functional validation as well as for performance regression testing for on going builds/releases.

It supports our agile approach not only philosophically but now practically in enabling us to provide performance testing “On Demand” and earlier in the development lifecycle.

This allowed us to act quickly on several occasions where it was crucial to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks with minimal delay.

It's definitely helped in scaling the performance of our application.