Background of the Field
Due to the wide reach of the internet, cloud infrastructure, and mobility; every person in the world can be your potential customer if you are ready to cater to them with your software solutions.
The limit of your service solely depends on how many people you can cater to. A few examples: Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Netflix, etc.
One has to think through and design properly for developing a highly scalable and highly available software solution.
Similarly, validation and verification of highly scalable and highly available software system is also an elaborate activity.
Why AFourTech For Performance Testing Services?
We typically break down software performance testing services into two phases.
In the first phase, we test the system with very modest hardware resources; then we stress the system up to that point till it breaks down. This process is called as stress testing.
In this process, we try to find the software and design bottlenecks in the system.
It is either done from the production system by removing personally identifiable information (PII) from it, or by generating production equivalent data using custom-built utilities.
We then simulate load according to the peak load of the production environment and by keeping some buffer load on the top of it for a considerable period to mimic the production environment.
Application metrics and system metrics are recorded and monitored while the performance test is being conducted. Application metrics such as page response time, system throughput, transaction time, etc. are observed.
System parameters such as processor, memory, I/O network utilization, are also measured.
In the end, the loss of any test data is verified while checking for any errors or exceptions in the logs.
Based on all this data we prepare a report which consists of vital statistics and insights. We also present our recommendations regarding architectural design to improve system performance.
Performance Testing : Problems solved for our customers
For a General Insurance customer, our performance testing services team designed a performance test strategy and conducted performance testing of their application user interface.
The customer’s system was developed using Microsoft technology stack and was deployed over the Windows platform.
We used open-source tools to conduct performance testing.
For a Health Information Exchange customer, we designed performance test strategies for different test components like web series services, BizTalk Adaptor interface, Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) component.
We performed component stress testing as well as an end to end testing for the entire system. We also conducted stress testing of the whole system.
Post that we carried out performance testing of end to end system with 1 million patient demographic hl7 messages, and 30 million clinical data hl7 messages.
We also tested EMPI component in the cloud as well as local data centre environment and provided capacity planning inputs
For a Banking software product, our performance testing services team designed and conducted stress as well as performance testing in the on-prem environment as well as over the AWS cloud.
The product was developed using Microsoft technology stack and was hosted on Windows server with IIS as web and application server.
For a mobile data management (MDM) customer, we planned and conducted stress as well as load testing for the critical user scenarios such as bulk device enrolment, bulk user enrolment, and enterprise application distribution. The solution was a Multi-Tenant solution and was hosted over the AWS cloud environment.
For a distributed peer to peer data backup product, we performed stress and performance testing of the agent node components as well as Central coordinator component.
For an enterprise-scale Retail Task Management customer’s product, we designed and performed end to end performance testing for their solution. It was deployed in their own data centre which was located remotely.
This involved generating and feeding the system with complex base data and also resetting of the system state at the end of every performance test run.
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Performance Testing Services we Provide
Services we provide include:
- Consulting for architecture design review of the system.
- Performance Test Strategy, Design, and Execution.
- Capacity planning.
- Implementing design and code changes for performance enhancement of the applications.
Team Composition
Our Performance testing services team, has performance test architects who have around 10+ years of experience in the industry, and who have performed strategizing performance test development, and performance test execution for various software products.
We have performance test engineers who can develop performance tests using open source as well as commercial tools. Build seed data for setting up production equivalent environment, execute performance tests, and prepare performance test reports.
We have software architects who can analyze the system, recommend design, and code changes.
We have software engineers who can help in fixing performance issues.
Software Performance Testing : tools & technologies
We use AWS, Azure, Openstack based cloud to simulate cloud-based production environments. Our engineers can deploy complex test environments from scratch.
We use Virtual Machines or Containers to deploy performance test environment according to production deployment architecture
On Linux systems, we use tools such as Prometheus, Graphite, Nagios, and utilities like Top, nmon, vmstat, Iotop, iostat, Iftop for recording and monitoring systems metrics.
On windows systems, we use tools such as perfmon, SCOM, Nagios for recording and monitoring system metrics
We use web server logs to record server response time and throughput. We use load generation tools to record client response time.
We use open-source tools such as Nagios, ELK Stack, IIS Web Server Log Analyzer for analyzing web server logs
Based on the requirement, we build custom load generation utilities or use tools like Apache JMeter, Microsoft Visual Studio, IBM Rational Performance Tester, AppPerfect Load Test tool.