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Testing
the Limits in Internet Time What do you do when you have the most popular web site for people interested in college or graduate school rankings, your latest annual survey results are soon to be released, and you want to confirm the capabilities of your Internet hosting service provider? If you are U.S. News & World Report Inc., you engage TestPros of McLean, VA to assist you in testing and measuring your host's capabilities.
Since the early 1980s, U.S. News & World Report has provided information on the nation's colleges and universities. It publishes the popular selling books America's Best Colleges and America's Best Graduate Schools and maintains a web site as a source of information on the nation's colleges and universities at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/home.htm. Initially created in 1995, the education channel web site has become the most popular section of the U.S. News & World Report web site. The site has evolved into a completely interactive informational resource on colleges, universities or graduate schools and includes detailed comparisons against other schools, as well as, rankings based upon any number of user selected criteria. Prospective college students, high school guidance counselors, college professors, and other interested persons access the site every day to obtain information on more than 1,400 colleges or universities maintained in the database. U.S. News & World Report releases its annual survey of the top graduate schools at the end of March and the college rankings are published in September. When the annual college rankings are published and made available to the web site, the entire software development team at U.S. News & World Report is on a full alert. "We can get as many as 2 million page views in a single day after releasing the new college rankings", says Michael Piccorossi, Web Technician, Business Operations for U.S. News & World Report. "It is absolutely essential that our site can handle the traffic without a significant deterioration in response time" Piccorossi went on. That is why U.S. News & World Report contracted with TestPros of McLean, VA to have their new system configuration load tested to determine how much of a load it could handle.
Selecting a Testing Service Like many popular web sites, U.S. News & World Report uses a web hosting service from a large Internet Service Provider (ISP) to maintain their site and ensure its dependable operation. "Our new hosting provider has the facility and the expertise that can handle a site like ours", says Piccorossi. "They recommended TestPros to help us determine if our new configuration could handle the projected load we are anticipating when the new graduate school rankings come out." Piccorossi's team of engineers met with TestPros testing experts to discuss the overall objectives of a test and to plan out when the test should occur. The testing objectives were twofold. First, U.S. News & World Report wanted to determine the load capability of a single web server within the Exodus computer operation environment, in order to understand just how much processing a single web server could handle. Second, they wanted to know how 'truly' scalable their software application was. Is it possible to simply add another server and double the capacity of the software? And, is this a linear function that would allow multiple servers to be added or is there a point of diminishing returns? These were the questions that the development team posed to TestPros. Testing and Analysis Working with the development team and the new web hosting provider, TestPros designed a series of three tests to simulate the conditions necessary to answer the development team's questions. The testing engineers from TestPros utilized a series of automation testing tools to generate the user workload requesting pages from the site. During the test, TestPros recorded the response times and the system utilization under the various tests and plotted the results on graphs for interpretation by the testing engineers. "The overall test went off very smoothly without any problems", says Kevin Murray, Vice President of Operations of TestPros. "U.S.News & World Report was very well prepared and gave us the support we needed to achieve a valid test", Murray went on. After the testing was completed, TestPros prepared a detailed written report to review with Piccorossi's team. The report contained a comprehensive summary of the testing results and concluded that U.S. News & World Report’s new hosting service and web site configuration would not only meet the anticipated volume but could handle approximately twice the anticipated volume before additional servers were required. The detailed reports showed the engineering development team which portions of the application were creating the largest strain on the system. The engineers could then review the individual components to determine if there were areas that would improve the operation of the web site and increase user response time. "I was delighted by the depth of the report and the extent of the information we were able to receive", says Piccorossi. "We have already incorporated many of their suggestions and are always looking at how we can improve the operation of our web site."
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