Large Site Preparation
On-Line Brokerage Operation

Business Challenge

The client, a large financial institution building an on-line brokerage service, was concerned that performance levels under their production loads of 10 million hits per day would be unacceptable. The client did not have the internal resources required to help them understand application performance from a holistic view.

The client's main goal was to reach a response time of less than five seconds under a load of 1.8 billion trades per day. They wanted to ensure that the application(s) would remain stable and provide the required response times under load conditions.

They also wanted to be able to determine the server specifications required to support these applications under the varied conditions. Finally, they wanted to gain market share by introducing new products in a timely manner. They did not think that their systems would scale to do this. To achieve their objectives, the client was moving to a new software service architecture based on Tibco Rendezvous.

Solution

Acumen Solutions executed stress testing to simulate production level loads on the individual software modules and the entire system. The team then conducted software profiling to provide developers with detailed measurements of memory and CPU usage, including actual CPU run times. Acumen Solutions also performed software engineering to interpret results and integrate client software into stress test systems.

Return on Investment

As a result of this work, the client decreased response time by 70% from 22.1 seconds to 6.4 seconds. This enabled the client to increase market share and revenues. The following table illustrates the dramatic response time improvement under a load of 30 users and 900 transactions.

 

Average Time

Minimum Time

Maximum Time

Before Acumen Solutions

22.15

15.45

31.88

After Acumen Solutions

6.44

4.20

8.03

 

Acumen Solutions reduced CPU utilization by 50%, from 90% to 40. The Acumen Solutions team dramatically reduced swapping (virtual) memory consumption from 92 to 28 Megabytes, and reduced Resident Memory consumption from 55 to 8 Megabytes. Acumen Solutions also stabilized the memory consumption and eliminated consumption growth.

Technology Expertise

The Acumen Solutions team utilized their expertise in the following: