A prototype-driven approach to application-level performance testing: a case study of a large finance application

We present an approach to application-level performance testing. This uses a popular test tool, TPNS (Teleprocessing Network Simulator) to simulate performance of an application. Our approach hinges upon a simple prototype to verify that the system performance falls within acceptable bounds. Once the initial prototype is developed, detailed tuning may take place. We present a case study in which we tested the performance of a large finance application. This approach led to critical performance tuning improvement. Due to this improvement, the average user response time in our simulations was reduced from 30 seconds to under 1.5 seconds. This simulation has been verified by actual system usage during the first two months of live operation in which the average response time has indeed been under 1.5 seconds