Key To Perform Well In A Web Environment

Businesses intent on deriving revenue and efficiently servicing customers via a web-based business channel must be continuously aware of how well they are adjusting to rapidly changing conditions and unknown variables. Applications that were once relied upon to support a known number of users, accessing systems with known technologies, growing at known intervals and internal to a particular business, are now expected to support exponentially higher volumes of unpredictable users accessing systems with varying technologies and network structures, growing at relatively unknown.

Consider that industry estimates reveal that the number of worldwide Internet users was just under 200 million in 2000, and that number is expected to more than double by 2003. Even at 400 million, the number of Internet users will only represent 5.7% of the worlds total population, leaving room for significant population expansion of Internet users. As the population of the user audience expands, that audience gains experience and familiarity with the convenience of transacting business online and will ultimately become less tolerant of poor performance. At the same time that audiences of Internet users expand, web applications continue to grow in size, complexity, features, and scope of integration with other applications and systems, both internal and external to a business. Simultaneously, new technologies continue to be introduced, adding more complexity to already complex environments. Web application environments must be open and flexible enough to support the multitude of technology combinations relied upon by their heterogeneous mix of users and load test solutions must be robust enough to handle accurate testing of these complex environments. Configuration changes to an application infrastructure, the addition of clusters of servers or any new infrastructure devices, the partnership with new service providers, the integration with new applications or the requirement for a newly released application to share the computing resources of an infrastructure are several very strong drivers for the execution of load tests. The addition of application features and functions or changes to existing features and functions are also strong drivers for the execution of load tests. In addition businesses must stay in sync with business growth, changes in Internet traffic patterns and customer profiles, seasonal usage patterns, special promotions and marketing campaigns. All of these various types of changes drive the need for load testing on a regular basis. In an effort to ensure that the profile of a user audience isnt negatively impacting performance, schedule a monthly load test that realistically emulates the current customer profile (use web logs to extract appropriate information). For example, maybe the number of site visitors that are becoming customers is increasing, and if so, how is the increased number of online
purchase transactions affecting site performance? Is the application able to deliver responses within the realm of business expectations? In another scenario, maybe the business marketing manager is planning a special campaign for a busy holiday season, like Christmas or Valentines day. If that promotion is going to reach millions of potential buyers, is the site prepared to handle volumes of traffic that may spike and exceed daily traffic volumes by a factor of two or higher?

All of these evolving variables have the potential to drive heavier volumes of customers to a particular business system at any given time. Thus, applications and their supporting infrastructures must be able to handle steady volumes of sustained traffic as is relates to known business patterns as well as unanticipated spikes of user traffic. This is an important point to keep in mind as load tests are developed because not only should a system be able to handle normal, anticipated traffic patterns, but it must also be able to survive unanticipated spikes of traffic and potential denial of service attacks.