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case study
etest
associates tests shock performance
One
of etest associates’ clients had developed a collection of shockwave
applications that used a bespoke TCP/IP-level, 2-way, near-real-time
conversations to execute transactions between the client and server.
Features of the site also included e-commerce credit card transactions
and online registration. The target audience for these applications will
result in demands placed on the site of over 2000 concurrently active
users. That is equivalent to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of
thousands of registered users.
The
business-plan for the end-client relied on the success of the site and
its ability to meet the demands of peak-loads from its paying customers
accessing these online applications so that they remained paying
customers. The servers needed to support near real-time client-server
communications from browsers with the Shockwave plug-in, with a mix of
HTTP and HTTPS (SSL) transactions thrown in for good measure whilst
maintaining performance with a load of over 2000 concurrent users...
Performance load and stress testing was not a nicety… it was a
necessity!
Utilising
this TCP/IP level client-server communications capability of Macromedia
Shockwave, which in this case included encrypted hand-shaking for client
and server authentication, combined with the fact that aspects of the
conversations were randomised and dynamic, presented several Automated
Testing challenges. Building intelligent automated test scripts that
would emulate the activity of thousands of users accessing the
applications, whilst responding appropriately to random and dynamic data
conditions from the server wasn’t a typical record-edit-playback
approach as used to performance test sites communicating in just HTTP/S.
Looking
at the tools and services on the market, there did not appear to be a
cost effective or practical solution… in-fact there did not appear to
be a solution! One well-known tools vendor spent an entire day
attempting to find a way of making their tool capture the TCP/IP
conversation, but to no avail.
Utilising
extensive contacts in the industry, and investing its own R&D
efforts, etest associates quickly found a tool, still in development,
that would capture both client-server conversations (http and TCP/IP) and
enable the flexibility of coding intelligent automated performance test
scripts.
Working
in partnership with the developers of this tool, two separate tools (one
for TCP/IP level performance test scripting and the other for HTTP/S
level performance test scripting) were integrated and tested. A service
made up of etest associates performance testing & technical
expertise and the capabilities of this new tool was constructed enabling
a cost-effective solution to be made available to all customers
utilising the TCP/IP-level client-server, near real-time communications
capabilities of Macromedia Shockwave and Flash.
etest
associates rapidly delivered this capability and despite the volume of
effort and technical challenges that were involved, can now deliver this
capability to the client whilst still meeting the commercial
time-scales.
Having
spoken to Macromedia directly, we believe our solution to be unique.
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