Testing Enterprise or Global Applications
Whether it is a web service, a web application or an enterprise application, odds are that users are located all over the world and are accessing the application thru various bandwidths and latencies, making performance and quality over the wire itself increasingly critical. Today, most performance testing tools approach problems from a client side or server side perspective, but not the wire itself. LeadByte NetworkSmart changes this picture.
Today, a large emphasis is placed on server load capacity and stress testing: What is the break point? How many users can be served at once? While these questions are valid, most stress testing tools do not truly profile the experience of an individual user. This can only be accomplished by understanding how the application communicates across the wire between the various machines. NetworkSmart uniquely provide this insight.
Understanding the Network Characteristics of an Application
Few application teams understand how bandwidth and latency will affect users of their enterprise or global application. Some teams simply calculate the amount of data the application sends and compares that amount to the size of the bandwidth pipe. However, there are very important behaviors of the application, such as round trips, that are not being considered in the described example.
Let’s assume for a minute that the login of your application takes 1 sec on your LAN and it only transmits 100Kb of data. We separate this 1 second duration time into 4 parts: a.) Client Processing Time b.) Server Processing Time c.) Data Transmission Time and d.) Round Trip Delay.
Client and server processing are usually always minimal. The above scenario of calculating the amount of application data only accounts for the data transmission. At this point, one would think that 3.3 seconds would be the accurate response time projection.
However, one must still account for the network behavior of the application, or what we call the round trip delay. Factors that need to be considered are the number of round trips required by the application, the amount of latency in the pipe, the efficiency of data packets sent across the network and more. What took seconds to complete on a LAN in some cases could take minutes on remote networks. Applications that transmit a large amount of data or generate a high number of round trips will usually experience the poorest performance.
NetworkSmart is the best way to understand the network characteristics of an application, identify application bottlenecks or delays and accurately predict end user response times for global users. With NetworkSmart, no hardware communication devices, modems, WAN simulators, etc. are needed.
