Performance Testing of a Digital Ticketing Software
Customer
The Customer is a well-known Australian concert venue owner that hosts over 4,000 performances and concerts per year.
Challenge
The Customer owns a website that contains information about the concerts held in its venues. To enhance the website capabilities, the Customer developed a digital ticketing module that was supposed to work the following way: when a visitor buys a ticket on the Customer’s website, they receive an email with a link to the digital ticket. Once a visitor arrives at the concert venue, they access the link with the digital ticket and receive a QR code. Visitors can then scan the QR code and enter the venue.
To ensure stable performance of the digital ticketing software, the Customer wanted to check if the website could handle 4,500 visitors simultaneously gaining access to their tickets for 30 minutes, plus another 50 visitors browsing the website at the same time.
Solution
Impressed with ScienceSoft’s 33-year experience in software testing, the Customer turned to ScienceSoft for performance testing services. After analyzing the software, ScienceSoft’s performance testing team decided to conduct capacity, load, and spike tests to meet the Customer’s needs. ScienceSoft used Azure Virtual Machines to simulate the required number of virtual users and Apache JMeter to monitor the software performance.
The testing team ran capacity testing by gradually increasing the server load to understand the upper limit of the website performance. With a continuous load of 50 background users, the load of the digital tickets component was gradually increasing until it reached the peak load of ~11,500 users per hour.
At the peak load, an increase in the consumption of Web Gateway network resources was revealed while the network consumption by the load generator remained at a much lower level. The execution of stored procedures and/or additional tasks on the servers led to a bottleneck of high network resources consumption.
Next, ScienceSoft performed load testing to check the website’s stability under continuous load of 9,000 digital tickets accessed per hour, with 50 website users added as background load. Under continuous load, the digital ticketing module showed good performance with acceptable response time (<3.92 seconds).
As a third step of performance testing, ScienceSoft’s test engineers ran spike testing to check the website’s stability under spikes of load and its ability to return to normal condition.
The test engineers emulated the load of up to 12,000 virtual users gaining simultaneous access to digital tickets. At this threshold, a spike occurred in the response time of digital tickets links, reaching 90 seconds. In addition, ScienceSoft revealed that the internal software factors such as stored procedure execution, data migration, and cache refresh caused the sharp increase in the Web Gateway network utilization.
Results
The performance tests conducted by ScienceSoft’s team assured the Customer that the digital ticketing component of the website could reliably handle the load of 4500 users over a 30-minute timeframe. Still, ScienceSoft revealed several performance bottlenecks and recommended the Customer to further investigate the spikes in Web Gateway network consumption, check the network limits of the host provider, and boost the website server host.
Technologies and Tools
Apache JMeter, Azure Virtual Machines
