Synthetic Monitoring
The new web site of Stockholm City (www.stockholm.se) has 10,000 daily visitors and plays an increasingly important part in the local government’s communication to the city’s inhabitants.
It is hence of outmost importance that the web site and its applications can handle a vast number of visitors and that response time is the shortest possible. Apica is a Swedish company which performs advanced performance- and loadtests of web applications.
It is Apica’s application Apica Loadtest which has been used in the process of testing and quality assurance of Vings web site. Apica LoadTest is an application which performs loadtests of both public and internal (intranet) web sites.Apica LoadTest creates a reality based load by using so called “synthetic users” from a range of different test centers, which generates actual and real traffic patterns as they are created by the end users of the site.
The new web site of Stockholm City was launched in May 2008, but intially suffered performance problems, why Stockholm City invested in improvements of the technical production environment and thereby certifying quality and availability.
Apica has worked together with TietoEnator/SiriusIT to perform a series of loadtests, with a large number of simulated users, in order to verify the quality of the re-worked web platoform, before it was put live again. It now functions well, handling an average of 10,000 daily visitors; a number which is expected to increase as new functionalities are added to the site. Fast and stable response times are a priority for such a well visited web site.
The information on www.stockholm.se is divided, so that information relevant for all is presented across the site, and that information specific for each and every district of the city is presented in separately. Principal subjects are information on jobs, city planning, family and care, schools, family, climate and environmental, sports and entertainment and traffic.
On the web site, information on the city’s organisation, history as well as links to statistics and map databases also can be found. The visitor to the site also can read up on how Stockholm is governed, who sits on the city council, how the inhabitants tax money is spent, current event, etc, etc.
Loadtests are an important part of the optimisation of a web site and its application’s performance. Loadtests will check that the application delivers stable, low and consitent response times through the whole spectrum of load on the site. A loadtest often is – and should always be – the final step before a new or updated application is launched. By utilising Apica’s external loadtesting facilities, the risk of unexpected disturbance is minimised.
In addtion to the Apica Loadtest application, Apica offers Apica Availability (a complete application for all aspects of availability testing), Apica ServerMonitor (which measures and analyses an IT-infrastructure’s performance) and Apica Acceleration (which is a Varnish based application for outstanding web performance enhancement).