Web Performance, Inc Boosts SHRM Website Capacity by 2,000 Percent in Time for Launch
Society for Human Resources Management website able to service its 250,000 members while introducing potential savings of $200,000.
Durham, NC – February 19, 2009 – The new Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) website was recently given a huge capacity boost in time for its unveiling, enabling the site to handle large amounts of traffic from its 250,000 members. Web Performance, Inc., (WPI) developers of industry-leading Web Performance Load Tester™ software, increased the site’s capacity from 100 to 2000 users, and reduced server requirements to less than 25% CPU utilization, eliminating two servers altogether and reducing potential software license expenses by nearly $200,000.
“Our new website is one of our major benefits to our members,” said Vladan Dasic, network operations manager at SHRM.. “We needed to make sure it could to handle up to 1500 concurrent users during peak hours.”
WPI’s initial load tests, however, revealed serious bottlenecks in SHRM’s customized SharePoint Server cluster. At only 200 users, the cluster generated average page durations of 10-30 seconds, serving only four pages per second—hardly the capacity the site would need to serve up page views of nearly 15,000 documents.
WPI developed five custom test cases to exercise various navigation paths to a small subset of 500 site documents. They then ran several rounds of load tests, each focusing on a single server to isolate the cause, tuning the cluster’s configuration each time with custom code that incrementally improved capacity.
“Some performance problems have multiple causes,” says Chris Merrill, chief engineer at Web Performance, Inc. “During the initial testing phase, and during the entire course of our engagement, we discovered a number of bottlenecks that were choking system performance. Working closely with SHRM’s development partners, we eliminated the bottlenecks and optimized the system, dramatically increasing the peak capacity of the cluster.”
The new SHRM website (www.shrm.org) can now support 2000 concurrent users with an average of nearly 45 pages per second—a rate equivalent to nearly 3.9 million page hits per day if sustained for an entire day. With additional system bandwidth, the site could potentially support up to 8000 concurrent users.
A case study describes more technical details about the testing process and the lessons learned.
Web Performance, Inc is a leading website performance testing company founded by web technology experts who saw a growing demand for easy-to-use web testing software for projects of all sizes, especially during early development stages. Its offerings include testing services and software, including industry-leading Web Performance Load TesterTM. For more information, visit webperformance.com, or call 919-845-7601.