Beautiful Testing

It Can’t Be the Network

As it turned out, the eVersity project was canceled before the application made it into production (and by canceled, I mean that client just called one day to tell us that their entire division had been eliminated), so we never got a chance to see how accurate our performance testing had been. On the bright side, it meant that the team was available for the client-server to Web call-center conversion project that showed up a couple of weeks later.

The first several months of the project were uneventful from a performance testing perspective. Sam and the rest of the developers kept me in the loop from the beginning. Jim, the client VP who commissioned the project, used to be a mainframe developer who specialized in performance, so we didn’t have any trouble with the contract or deliverables definitions related to performance, and the historical system usage was already documented for us. Sure, we had the typical environment, test data, and scripting challenges, but we all worked through those together as they came up.

Then I ran across the strangest performance issue I’ve seen to this day. On the web pages that were requesting information from the database, I was seeing a response time pattern that I referred to as “random 4s.” It took some work and some help from the developers, but we figured out that half of the time these pages were requested, they returned in about .25 seconds. Half of the rest of the time, they’d return in about 4.25 seconds. Half of the ...