Rapid response times mean the difference between user acceptance and user abandonment.

The modern online experience is increasingly driven by applications. Whether mobile or tethered, subscribers expect a high Quality of Experience (QoE), even at peak traffic times. Rapid response times mean the difference between user acceptance and user abandonment.

But the metric commonly used to measure server performance—CPU utilization—doesn’t indicate user response time. And with potentially multiple virtual machines (VMs) and multiple tenants sharing a single server in cloud environments, the threat of intra server attack requires the use of security software that can also affect performance.

What to Test

To understand the QoE and improve server performance, application server testing must address:

• Intra-server performance—to validate performance between VMs on the same server
• Inter-server performance—to validate performance across servers
• Network infrastructure—impact from hundreds to thousands of servers aggregating traffic
• Number of connections—that can be established and their impact on response time

Spirent Solutions

Server testing solutions from Spirent provide a means for improving server response time and understanding overall performance:

• Avalanche provides complete multi 10Gbps security, attack and performance testing, enabling users to test servers at line rate speeds to simulate daily business traffic and understand the impact of network faults and attacks
• Spirent Studio Performance ensures your applications and network infrastructure will perform and scale under real-world conditions and loads
• Enterprise OnDEMAND On-Site Performance Testing is designed to detect and mitigate problems before you launch any new infrastructure or IT solution