For a while I have been saying to everyone I know that Crystal Reports is more efficient at processing reports than Web Intelligence but I have never had any concrete proof. So I decided to set myself a small project that compares Web Intelligence document to the same report created in Crystal Reports. And the result of that project is Boest – a Java application that can be used for stress testing an SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise installation.
I’ve decided to make this application open source so that others can either just it to test their own systems or even contribute to extending it further to provide more functionality. This application can be downloaded from SourceForge.net.
Overview of Boest
The aim of Boest is to simulate a number of users who are all logged in at the same time and are also viewing and refreshing a report. While Boest is running we can use system tools such as Performance Monitor on a Windows server to measure CPU usage and memory consumption.
One of the key features of the application is that you can set it up so that it executes a test for say 5 users in parallel. It can then repeat that test a set number of times in order to obtain an average and then do the test again for 10 users, 15 users and so on. By doing this we can analyse the results and get an estimate for how much resource a user takes and so extrapolate for a maximum number of users.
A second feature of Boest is that it can be used to create the resources for stress testing. Here you can use the application to create user accounts and test documents and it does this by duplicating an existing account and existing documents. It can also remove all these once you’ve finished testing.
Full details of how to use the application can be found in the User Guide which comes with the deployment package and further information is also provided at the applications home page.
Getting Started
To get started first download Boest from the link above. The application doesn’t need installed and so copy the ZIP package to a folder from which you want to execute the tests and unzip the package.
Read the ReadMe and the Deployment Guide for instructions on how to set up the application and then read the User Guide for how to then use the application for your stress testing.
You may also wish to download the Results Analysis Package with allows you to process the results using SQL Server. This can be downloaded from,
I’ll shortly post an article that descibes in more detail how to use the application and the results of Web Intelligence vs Crystal Reports stress testing!
Get Involved!
This is first release of this application and it is by no means complete. I will be extending it myself but if you want to get involved then please get in touch. Either through SourceForge.net or added a comment here.
Further work is required on adding more workflows and improvements to the analysis database to make it more user friendly and porting to other platforms.
Cheers!
Al Gulland
Al Gulland 
Hi Al –
This is incredibly impressive and a terrific community contribution of your own hard work so congratulations for that.
As far as involvement from others – how about creating a topic and attracting some discussion around it over at SDN? Just an idea.
Atul
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Hi
thanks for your kind words! I only posted this all up just last week and am thinking on how to promote it. i’m putting together an article that is the results of doing some stress testing and will probably do something at that point. But yes certainly SDN is a good place
regards
AL
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Al –
This sounds like a great tool.
I am looking forward to using it on my next BOE migration project.
Thanks,
Mark
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Do you have a BOE4 version?
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No, but the SDK can be backword compatible and so may work – i haven’t tried.
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Hi Gulland,
So it works fine for Deski reports as well right?
Thanks
Alex
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Did you ever get this to work in BOE4? I installed version 1 in my BOE4 SP5 system. Creating users and Reports worked but got bunch of Java Errors when tests were run.
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Hi
No, I haven’t yet and I’m disappointed that it doesn’t work – so much for backward compatible SDK!
I’ll need to look into this and see whats up
AL
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This would be very valuable as part of an upgrade scenario. Let me know if you get it to work. I have a few quite large customer the could use it.
Ang.
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This would have saved me a whole lot of pain. Here is an example where the tool could have avoided much embarassing BOE “features”. I was recently working with a customer doing SAP Business Objects Enterprise training using cloud services. The gist of the training system involved at least two BOE4 systems and around 20 “student” workstations. The students ran Webi reports opened from links within an Xcelsius Dashboard. The BOE systems themselves were at least 4 CORE CPU with around 12 GIG of memory. These are Windows boxes.
Due to a misconfiguration of the clients (Windows 2008 R1 machines) the IE “POP UP Blocker” was turn on and the Windows Intranet Settings were turned OFF. During the initial part of the test, when students would click on the Web Intelligence Open Doc links, we noticed that the BOE servers WebiReport Servers would go into high CPU and high memory spikes. Because the return openDoc call comms to the clients were being blocked by IE, the BOE Report Servers just went runaway. Both servers were seen to crash consistently. I do not know if this affects Unix or if the condition is different with Web Logic as these were Tomcat app servers.
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Sorry to hear your pain! I’ve been busy with other commitments but I’ll take a look at this and see if there’s a simple fix to get it working with BI4.
That’s a strange scenario you had there – I’m surprised that a client pop up blocker can overload a server in this way (not very secure!) and I would’ve expected the server process to cancel if a client is not responding.
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