Load and Stress Testing for Large Online Retailer

Published 5th January 2009

The client, a retailer based in the US, selling a wide variety of products has almost 1000 stores across the US. Their turnover is approximately $15 billion, a large percentage of which of this is earned through their comprehensive website which sells all the products in the organization’s portfolio.

The website that handles large number of audience, invites volume of traffic, hence necessitating a highly functioning website dealing with regular updates. To attain its objectives, the client chose to redesign the website, making it more user friendly. This effort of revision and upgrade posed significant risks, which the client wanted to mitigate. It was then that AppLabs was recommended by one of their partners, who suggested the client to undertake performance testing of their redesigned website.

As the process of upgrading was continual and required repeated testing along with its development, AppLabs were employed initially in a year long contract to provide intermittent testing at various stages of the development cycle. The focus of the testing was determining the end user experience, including factors such as page load times.

AppLabs, with their performance engineers working on the project from their test laboratory in Lindon, Utah and testers based in Hyderabad, India, conducted the load tests on a quarterly basis in accordance with the client releasing new patches to the application. 3 load tests were conducted with the load amount gradually increasing, ramping up to load tests which peaked with 25,000 concurrent users. In due course of time, the tests run by AppLabs showed the client the areas that were not meeting the necessary speeds, issues found in the Database and functionality related XML launcher, thus highlighting areas which required improvements. With this the client went about conducting remedial work to improve the performance of the application.

The involvement of AppLabs has enabled the client to reach their target of 1750 page views per second. The website is now able to support 25,000 concurrent users.

Read the complete Project Example visit : http://www.applabs.com/html/LoadStressTest.html