A Passion for Customer Satisfaction

This article discusses key requirements for developing test scripts to do performance tests on WebSphere® Commerce Web applications, so that you can avoid common test script problems.

Introduction

Scripting a proper workload simulation to stress test a WebSphere Commerce site is an involved process. You cannot record a few fixed paths of navigation through the site, and then simply scale up the concurrent number of simulated users to execute those paths. This does not work because of the complex relationships between the caching strategy, the application, and the database. If they are subjected to a rigid workload, then these are tuned to give false encouraging results that fall apart when a real dynamic traffic load is applied to the system. We have seen this over-simplified stress testing strategy result in catastrophic performance consequences for sites when they are launched or when they face seasonal traffic.

This article focuses on key requirements to keep in mind while developing performance test scripts for a business to consumer (B2C) WebSphere Commerce site. This type of site is used for the typical online retailer serving large numbers of public shoppers. These shoppers browse a catalog and then order from it.