JMeter results analysis - Oracle XE 11g on Ubuntu 12.04 using Vagrant

This project enables you to install Oracle 11g XE in a virtual machine running Ubuntu 12.04, using Vagrant and Puppet.

After installation of Oracle, an external table is created, to allow a JMeter result file to be dropped in for querying.

This is significantly faster than processing massive result files using scripts. On my machine, to produce overall stats for a file containing ~100M rows took < 6 minutes.

Acknowledgements

The project vagrant-ubuntu-oracle-xe by Hilverd Reker was used as a starting point.

Thanks to Hilverd. His acknowledgements have also been included in full below:

The project was created based on the information in Installing Oracle 11g R2 Express Edition on Ubuntu 64-bit by Manish Raj, and the GitHub repository vagrant-oracle-xe by Stefan Glase. The former explains how to install Oracle XE 11g on Ubuntu 12.04, without explicitly providing a Vagrant or provisioner configuration. The latter has the same purpose as this project but uses Ubuntu 11.10.

Thanks to André Kelpe, Brandon Gresham, Charles Walker, Chris Thompson, Jeff Caddel, Joe FitzGerald, Justin Harringa, Mark Crossfield, Matthew Buckett, Richard Kolb, and Steven Hsu for various contributions.

Requirements

• You need to have Vagrant installed.
• The host machine probably needs at least 4 GB of RAM.
• As Oracle 11g XE is only available for 64-bit machines at the moment, the host machine needs to have a 64-bit architecture.
• You may need to enable virtualization manually.

Installation

• Check out this project:

    git clone https://github.com/hilverd/vagrant-ubuntu-oracle-xe.git
  

• Install vbguest:

    vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
  

• Download Oracle Database 11g Express Edition for Linux x64. Place the file oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm.zip in the directory modules/oracle/files of this project. (Alternatively, you could keep the zip file in some other location and make a hard link to it from modules/oracle/files.)

• Run vagrant up from the base directory of this project. The first time this will take a while -- up to 30 minutes on my machine. Please note that building the VM involves downloading an Ubuntu 12.04 base box which is 323MB in size.

These steps are also shown in an asciicast made by Daekwon Kang:

• Copy a JMeter result file in the directory Data and name it jmeter.log.

The file is expected to be in CSV format (header row shown):

timeStamp;elapsed;label;responseCode;responseMessage;threadName;dataType;success;bytes;grpThreads;allThreads;Latency;SampleCount;ErrorCount;Hostname;"testid"

jmeter.properties values used:

jmeter.save.saveservice.output_format=csv

jmeter.save.saveservice.default_delimiter=;

jmeter.save.saveservice.data_type=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.label=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.response_code=true

jmeter.save.saveservice.response_message=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.successful=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.thread_name=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.time=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.subresults=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.assertions=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.latency=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.bytes=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.hostname=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.thread_counts=true
jmeter.save.saveservice.sample_count=true

sample_variables=testid

For different formats of data, you will need to modify the /modules/oracle/files/create_jmeter_tables.sql file before running Vagrant up.

Connecting

You should now be able to connect to the new database at localhost:1521/XE as system with password manager. For example, if you have sqlplus installed on the host machine you can do

sqlplus system/manager@//localhost:1521/XE

To make sqlplus behave like other tools (history, arrow keys etc.) you can do this:

rlwrap sqlplus system/manager@//localhost:1521/XE

You might need to add an entry to your tnsnames.ora file first:

XE =
  (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = 127.0.0.1)(PORT = 1521))
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SERVER = DEDICATED)
      (SERVICE_NAME = XE)
    )
  )

Querying the JMeter results

You should now be able to query the jmeter table:

Sample SQL (update start/end time as per your requirements):

SELECT label,
  success,
  COUNT(*),
  MIN(elapsed) min,
  ROUND(AVG(elapsed),2) mean,
  percentile_disc (0.95) within GROUP (ORDER BY elapsed) AS perc95,
  MAX(elapsed) max,
  ROUND(stddev(elapsed),2) stdev
FROM jmeter
  WHERE ts > ((to_date('11/02/2016 12:00:00', 'DD/MM/YYYY HH24:Mi:ss') - TO_DATE('1970-01-01', 'YYYY-MM-DD'))* 86400000)
  AND ts   < ((to_date('11/02/2016 13:00:00', 'DD/MM/YYYY HH24:Mi:ss') - TO_DATE('1970-01-01', 'YYYY-MM-DD'))* 86400000)
GROUP BY label,
  success;

Troubleshooting

Errors when Unzipping

If you get an error containing /usr/bin/unzip -o oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm.zip returned 2 during vagrant up, then the zip file you have downloaded is probably corrupted. This can be fixed by re-downloading, replacing the corrupted file, and running vagrant reload --provision.

Memory

It is important to assign enough memory to the virtual machine, otherwise you will get an error

ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

during the configuration stage. In the Vagrantfile 1024 MB is assigned. Lower values may also work, as long as (I believe) 2 GB of virtual memory is available for Oracle, swap is included in this calculation.

Concurrent Connections

If you want to raise the limit of the number of concurrent connections, say to 200, then according to How many connections can Oracle Express Edition (XE) handle? you should run

ALTER SYSTEM SET processes=200 scope=spfile

and restart the database.

Alternatives

You may also want to consider a Docker-based solution such as docker-oracle-xe-11g.