Validating the Capacity of a File Transport Web Service
|
|
Government/Health and Human Services |
|
A government health organization provides web service based interfaces that enable public health
organizations to efficiently perform clinical surveillance regarding trends in public health.
The technical infrastructure provides a transport mechanism that securely transmits public health
related documents amongst health organizations and uses a combination of SOAP and ebXML to provide
a transport mechanism that is independent of the document type and file content. |
|
The objective was to determine the capacity and scalability of the file
transport web service with the intentions of providing guidelines for
optimal software configurations and infrastructure sizing guidelines
required to support a growing consumer base.
|
|
Automate the business processes of invoking the file transmission using
the targeted transport web service and executing a series of performance/scalability
tests of varying levels of system load.
|
RTTS provided an automated framework for testing
the messaging web service under varying levels
of concurrent usage.
-
Business processes were automated in a manner that could vary the
size of the document being transferred, as well as account for the
different levels of security applied to the document transfer.
-
Tests were modeled and
executed based upon a
thorough understanding
of the pertinent health
organizations
characteristics, such as
the distribution of
document sizes that are
transferred on a daily
basis.
-
System resources were
monitored on each server
component in order to
determine the health of
the systems, as well as
the capacity of the
system.
-
Initial testing
revealed instability
within the transport
mechanism that began
with 40 concurrent
health organizations
transmitting
documents. At this
level of usage the
application
encountered
transport retries.
Beyond 40 concurrent
health organizations
the reliability of
the transport
mechanism was
undermined.
Figure 1: Document
Transport Time and Reliability |
-
The approach to business process automation permitted re-usable test assets that
could test varying permutations of file transfers, security policies and system
configurations. This added to the viability of the automated testing approach
that could withstand application changes over the lifetime of the web service
software.
-
The testing strategy
provided sufficient
exposure of the file
transport infrastructure
and the relationships
between its system
resource utilization and
the service demands of
its consumer end-points.
Bottlenecks could be
effectively identified
and system capacity
could be sized
appropriately.
|
