Testing the performance of a highly scalable e-commerce application by Testvox

“As the pandemic had left the world in despair, people around the globe had been looking for new ways to reinstate life.”

Background

Choosing the internet for businesses and being connected though being apart appeared to be the only option. This recent collaboration with Testvox has proven to be one of the most fruitful for its client, a medium-sized mobile application development firm. The client had recently received a huge project on developing a complete e-commerce solution for one of the biggest supermarket chains in the GCC. With 85+ super/hyper markets across the GCC, the business group was planning to expand into the digital world. Upon realizing the project had to be built with a highly scalable architecture and hence required to undergo performance testing at each stage, the client ended their search at Testvox. Testvox promised to work with the team and provided consultation during the development and architecture building process for this enormous project. The challenges faced by our team and solutions adopted have been discussed in this case study.

Challenges

• The client was expecting up to 50000 concurrent users at a time on the website and mobile application, therefore expected to keep up with the performance.
• Many of the GETAPI’s were performing poorly while testing due to disintegrated database queries.
• The client was using a schema less database.
• Issues with load testing after reaching 5000 concurrent users which required upgrading the servers and was costly.
• It was observed after switching to horizontal scaling of server, the load balancers were not scaling properly.
• Critical operations demanded by client –
  • Hassle free cart operations for 5000 concurrent users on the website.
  • Online payment processing for 3000 concurrent users.

Solutions

• Multiple performance testing was carried out throughout the software development life cycle.
• Continuous automated API benchmarking throughout the development process.
• Offered consultancy to optimize database by creating schema, indexing and switched to a better server.
• Suggested to switch from vertical to horizontal scaling options and implemented load balancers.
• Provided consulting and helped to fine tune the architecture to scale up on load balancers.
• Critical operations were converted to user journeys and load tested using scripts.
• Testvox is still conducting continuous performance testing on a quarterly basis.

Conclusion

The project is presently running smoothly with 50000 concurrent users. The business group is happily reaching out to its customers in the GCC with a hassle-free and high quality online shopping experience and Testvox still continues to provide API benchmarking and performance testing services to them.