Server Load Testing

Date: 22 March 2022

Category: Product News

On 16 March, our CEO Simon Hooper gave a talk to the UK Developers Group about load testing Wise Eyes.

This is Adam Brett’s review.

Simon sells a reporting solution, all written in Delphi, called WiseEyes. He needed to performance-test how this application would run on a server as he sets it up for customers who then access it with requests for Reports from their (many) offices.

Simon discussed the basic, sensible maths of actually computing Server Provision Requirements, reviewing the levels of likely peak and sustained load that may hit your system. He showed an all-Delphi test application which accesses his main application’s core code and runs multi-threaded requests against it. The multiple threads imitate multiple users, and code to audit performance as these threads run, recording the time they take to run and other key variables.

In an excellent talk Simon drilled into his own key findings, how different aspects of an application stress different elements of server hardware (RAM, CPU, Hard-disk etc.) He also found that key issues like how threads are scheduled can have significant impact on user experience.

Having an application which you can run up at any time in your own application and use to test the efficiency of your main application is clearly a huge asset. It was also amazing to see how simple server-side settings like anti-virus systems could impact on performance.