Performance testing can save you a lot of time ;-) and money. While load testing the new site of Selor (recruitment agency/testing agency for the Belgium Government), We, the team, found that a lot of time was being wasted, in seemingly harmless code. It was only a few milliseconds, but in many places.
We came up with few hypotheses.- the new virus scanner, who caused some problems in the past few weeks.
- the network disc.
After trying the first option, we saw a minor improvement.
But when hacking the application to use local disc, instead of a network drive, we had a factor 3 for normal response times. Not a bad start.
Result
We asked for a new rolled out system, and made sure we were using local discs, where possible, using the network disc only for our most critical parts.
We can now handle 5-to-7 times more traffic then before, without degrading performance.The customer and the team were thrilled with excitement. Being fast is cool!
Challenges?
The application is a modern SOA application, meaning a lot of remoting is going on. Without AppDynamics, we would have lot more hypotheses and many wiled gauze chases. But now we could see, where the time was being spend. => Don’t guess, but measure change!
