Case Study
Digital River Implements Agile Load Testing
Overview
Digital River is a leading provider of Commerce-as-a-Service
solutions. Companies of all sizes rely on Digital River’s
cloud-based commerce, payments and marketing services
to manage and grow their online businesses.
Through these services, Digital River connects B2B and B2C digital products companies and branded manufacturers with buyers across multiple devices and channels, and nearly every country in the world.
Through these services, Digital River connects B2B and B2C digital products companies and branded manufacturers with buyers across multiple devices and channels, and nearly every country in the world.
Challenge
With global clients like the Samsung, Kaspersky labs,
AVG, Avast, Sennheiser and Microsoft relying on its SaaS
e-commerce platform means that Digital River cannot afford
any performance glitches.
Digital River holds three development centers, in the US
and Ireland. With an entirely virtualized environment, load
testing is mixed in with production servers, establishing a
miniature version of the production setup with some of the
interfaces mocked out.
Apart from the primary goal of performance validation, Chad Martin, Sr. Technical Manager at Digital River, wanted to establish an agile environment where his team could deliver performance information back to the developers in as tight a loop as possible.
The load testing group was using LoadRunner but was frustrated with the high costs and lack of customer support. After conducting an analysis of available load testing solutions, the team settled on WebLOAD.
“My guys tried WebLOAD and were very impressed. After seeing a live demo, we decided that this is the direction we wanted to take, including scaling up WebLOAD to production integration with AWS” says Martin.
Apart from the primary goal of performance validation, Chad Martin, Sr. Technical Manager at Digital River, wanted to establish an agile environment where his team could deliver performance information back to the developers in as tight a loop as possible.
The load testing group was using LoadRunner but was frustrated with the high costs and lack of customer support. After conducting an analysis of available load testing solutions, the team settled on WebLOAD.
“My guys tried WebLOAD and were very impressed. After seeing a live demo, we decided that this is the direction we wanted to take, including scaling up WebLOAD to production integration with AWS” says Martin.
Solution
WebLOAD currently answers all of Digital River’s load testing
needs. The flexibility of WebLOAD allows the team to test
a wide variety of scenarios – from how many orders can
be run through a shopping carts on a site, to more specific
scenarios like a new inventory service, the transactions that
can be run simultaneously and how quickly it responds.
“It runs the gamut…everything,” says Martin. “We can be very high level – extracting logs from production and basically pulling out all the URLs that got hit in a day and pounding them with WebLOAD.”
The customer support change cannot be overestimated. “It’s a night and day from LoadRunner support. The WebLOAD team is great at responding to questions and dig in to help us regardless of the complexity of the problem. The support we’re getting from RadView has really exceeded our expectations.”
“It runs the gamut…everything,” says Martin. “We can be very high level – extracting logs from production and basically pulling out all the URLs that got hit in a day and pounding them with WebLOAD.”
The customer support change cannot be overestimated. “It’s a night and day from LoadRunner support. The WebLOAD team is great at responding to questions and dig in to help us regardless of the complexity of the problem. The support we’re getting from RadView has really exceeded our expectations.”
Results
Using WebLOAD, the Digital River team has set up an agile
process of load testing. The test team can pull a nightly
build and create an automated performance benchmark.
Once data is generated it is sent to developers immediately
so they see it the following morning.
“Software architects are working closely with my team to make quick changes based on our load testing reports,” says Martin. Another noticeable result was around Thanksgiving ecommerce sales. “We had a record breaking holiday season. We prepared all year, examining the performance of our SaaS platform and conducted a focused effort on iterative load testing together with the development group to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the system. When Thanksgiving came, it was happily boring – event with a site as large as the Microsoft store!!”
“Software architects are working closely with my team to make quick changes based on our load testing reports,” says Martin. Another noticeable result was around Thanksgiving ecommerce sales. “We had a record breaking holiday season. We prepared all year, examining the performance of our SaaS platform and conducted a focused effort on iterative load testing together with the development group to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the system. When Thanksgiving came, it was happily boring – event with a site as large as the Microsoft store!!”
User Feedback
Chad Martin Senior technical manager at Digital River, praised WebLOAD’s capabilities:
“After seeing a live demo, we decided that this is the direction we wanted to take, including scaling up WebLOAD to production integration with AWS."
Industry
e-commerce
Business Type
Enterprise
Country
USA
