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

Summary

A global supplier of technology and services to processing industries needed to ensure its Intranet and Extranet corporate applications — built on .NET, MOSS, and MS SQL — were ready to go live. INNERLUXES ran deep three-phase performance testing to find the maximum number of simultaneous users the environment could handle, validate a target of 4,000 users per hour, and detect system bottlenecks; all identified issues were eliminated for a stable launch.

About the Customer

The Customer is a global supplier of technology and services to processing industries — including mining, construction, recycling, pulp and paper, power, and oil and gas — with a large workforce across many countries.

The Challenge

The Customer turned to INNERLUXES 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 number of simultaneous users the environment could handle, check whether the applications could handle 4,000 users per hour, and detect system bottlenecks (if any).

The Solution

INNERLUXES's testing team carried out deep three-phase performance testing using the Silk Performer tool to check both customized and out-of-the-box applications. The team ran comprehensive monitoring of the applications and hardware on each server. The Customer received timely analysis of testing results 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.
• The IIS server stopped content compression when its CPU utilization reached a critical level.

The 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 of the applications after launch.

Technologies and Tools

Silk Performer, Atlassian Jira, MS SQL.