Performance Testing of Corporate Applications for a Global Tech&Service Supplier

Customer

A global supplier of technology and services in processing industries, including mining, construction, recycling, pulp and paper, power and oil and gas. The Customer’s personnel numbers 30,000 employees based in over 50 countries.

Challenge

The Customer turned to ScienceSoft to assure that Intranet and Extranet corporate applications based on .NET, MOSS and MS SQL as a backend were ready to go live. The Customer needed to find the maximum of simultaneous users that could be handled by the environment, check whether the applications could handle 4000 users per hour and detect system bottlenecks (if any).

Solution

ScienceSoft’s testing team carried out deep three-phase performance testing using Silk Performer tool to check customized and out-of-the-box applications. The team ran comprehensive monitoring of the applications and hardware on each server. The Customer received timely testing results analysis as well as detailed reporting after each test run phase.

Performance testing helped uncover several bottlenecks:

• Some pages had heavy SQL queries.
• Redundant server cache renewals made the whole applications slow.
• IIS server stopped content compression if its central processing unit load (CPU utilization) reached critical level.

Results

The bottlenecks above were eliminated. The Customer’s applications were successfully launched and started working in a more stable manner after the optimization. The Customer’s end-users were satisfied with the performance and stability level of the applications after the launch.

Technologies and tools

SilkPerformer, Atlassian JIRA, MS SQL.