Client:
A leading online school service platform, experienced significant growth in user [parents & students] traffic and transactions during peak admission seasons and Weekend events management process. This surge in traffic led to performance issues, including slow page load times, checkout failures, and occasional site crashes. To address these issues and ensure a seamless admission experience, all district’s schools across the product authorization decided to conduct extensive performance testing on its platform for that education software.
Challenge:
- During the initial phase, while digging to the application, A crucial part was deep understanding of complete end to end application traffic handling capacity.
- We faced the Difficult to cope with the frequent authentication user access changes in application, especially in web version.
- We triggered difficult to identify the perfect tools for it, which tools have maximum feature and cost effective as well.
Objectives
- Identify Performance Bottlenecks: Detect and resolve any performance issues that could affect user experience.
- Ensure Scalability: Verify that the application can handle increasing loads as the user base grows.
- Validate Response Times: Ensure that key transactions meet the specified performance criteria.
- Stability Under Load: Confirm that the application remains stable under sustained and peak load conditions.
- Resource Utilization: Monitor and optimize resource usage to prevent server overloads and ensure cost-efficiency
Strategy and Implementation
Requirements Gathering:
- Collaborated with stakeholders to identify critical performance criteria, such as acceptable response times for transactions, maximum concurrent users, and peak load expectations.
- Defined performance test scenarios, including login, quick apps, Internal reports, and ticket checkout.
Tool Selection:
- Chose JMeter for performance testing due to its robust feature set and ease of use.
Test Environment Setup:
- Created a dedicated performance testing environment mirroring the test env setup.
- Configured monitoring tools to track key metrics such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network usage.
Test Case Design:
- Developed detailed test cases simulating real-world scenarios with varying load conditions.
- Included tests for both average and peak loads to evaluate performance under different conditions.
Baseline Testing:
- Conducted initial baseline tests to capture current performance metrics.
- Used results to identify any immediate issues and set benchmarks for future tests.
Load Testing:
- Simulated increasing user loads to evaluate the application’s behavior under stress.
- Gradually increased the number of concurrent users to identify the maximum capacity.
Stress Testing:
- Applied extreme load conditions to test the application’s limits.
- Identified breaking points and analyzed failure modes to improve resilience.
Business Outcome
∙ Performance Bottlenecks Identified: Discovered and resolved several bottlenecks, including inefficient database queries and sub optimal server configurations. Improved overall response times for key transactions by 40%.
∙ Scalability Ensured: Verified that the application could handle 1,000 concurrent users without performance degradation. Ensured scalability to support future user growth.
∙ Response Time Validation: Achieved target response times for critical transactions, ensuring that 95% of transactions were completed within 2/4 seconds. Enhanced user experience by minimizing delays.
∙ Stability Under Load: Confirmed that the application remained stable under peak loads and during extended usage periods. Prevented crashes and ensured reliable operation.