Automating a tedious task: Testing SharePoint page performance

Here’s a quick and dirty PowerShell script that hits a supplied SharePoint-related URL and outputs the correlation ID so you can check the ULS logs to further investigate why the page took longer than expected to load.

The script takes three parameters:

1. SharePointUrl: The URL to test. Can be a SharePoint site collection, site, list, library, page. A resource in SharePoint.
2. numTries: The number of times to try hitting the URL. Default is 1000
3. unnaceptableTime – how long you deem is “too long” — milliseconds (i.e. 1000 = 1 second)

When you run the script, it will try connecting to the SharePoint site repeatedly and output attempts that take too long.

When SharePoint receives requests from users, it times how long it takes to process the request and returns this time in the SPRequestDuration HTTP header (in milliseconds). This script compares the returned SPRequestDuration to the unacceptableTime parameter and if the request took longer, it will output the SPRequestGUID which you can then use with Merge-SPLogFile to pull the ULS logs for the request.

param (
	
	$SharePointUrl = "https://yoursharepoint.example.com/demo/TypicalSharePointSite/SitePages/SomePageToTest.aspx",
	
	# Number of times to try hitting the page
	$numTries = 1000,
	
	# Number of milliseconds we'll say is too long for the page to return
	$unacceptableTime = 8000	
)

$timesTooLong = 0

# Repeat the number of times specified by $numTries
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $numTries; $i++) {

	# Build our URL to query SharePoint
	# We're going to abuse the rev parameter to trick our session into not caching the results from each query
	$requestUri = $SharePointUrl + "?rev=$i"
	
	# Issue our request to the fine SharePoint Server
	$Request = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $requestUri -UseDefaultCredentials
	
	# The request took too long so send out the details
	if ([int]$Request.Headers["SPRequestDuration"] -gt $unacceptableTime) {
	
		Write-Output "$($Request.Headers["SPRequestGuid"]) $($Request.Headers["SPRequestDuration"])ms $requestUri"
		
		$timesTooLong++
	
	}
	
	
}

Write-Output "$timesTooLong request(s) took longer than $($unacceptableTime)ms"