Mick Moignard's Blog

Matt White and I have just come back from two and a half days at IBM's Innovation labs at Hursley, same place that the XPages workshop late last year was held.  We went down there to do some performance and load testing on the xPages app that we've been doing for a customer.   It's been a great experience.  

First, it's an amazing resource, run by some very helpful people.   They seem to have just about every variety of kit available, so they were able to mimic the AIX gear that we initially expected the app to run on quite well.   Late in the day - well, as we arrived, actually - we asked for a Windows server too, because that's where the initial deployment is going to happen.   And nothing seemed too much trouble to provide, including a blade setup of boxes for the Rational Performance Tester agents to run on, so that we could fire lots of requests at the server over a short period.   The setup was such that we were productive  - application set up, working and running tests - by Monday afternoon. Ok, the app was a single Notes database with all the static data ready.  We had a preconfigured Directory with 7000 users ready to go before we started, and some test scripts ready,  but even so, I think we were well pleased with the progress we made, and that we'd already discovered with some preliminary runs that the application was capable of taking what we wanted to throw at it.  

Tuesday we refined the scripts, and then got down to running them and recording results.    We were pretty pleased.  The app met the response time and throughput goals  that we had on both the AIX and Windows server.   Two of the tests ran the W server pretty ragged - to the extent that one run crashed the server 9 minutes in to a 30-minute run, but not until we'd actually done about 120% of the current customer's expected daily load for one function - which happens over about a 3-hour period - before the server failed.  And we saw no application errors either, which was good.

I can't speak too highly of this facility and the people behind it - one of those things where the organisation is so good that you don't see it in action, it just happened.  The gear was all ready when we arrived, changes were made if we asked, just about everything worked first time, and where we lacked expertise in Rational Performance Tester, expertise was available.    Update: I should say particular thanks to Andy Walter who was our host.  Andy was extremely helpful in handling setting it all up and then changing things around as we worked.  Thanks, Andy.  And thanks to the others who came to help: Kelvin, Christian... too.  

So, if you are a business partner in the UK, and you need some testing facilities (or porting, migration or all sorts of other help), check the Hursley IIC out.