demos

Application Servers promise to allow organization to achieve new levels of scalability. But demonstrating scalability is a challenge. Applied Reasoning's product development team created a benchmarking application to demonstrate how well an application server meets the demands in an "extreme environment". The test lab reproduces an environment with high transaction rates and high user activities, pushing past the limits of a typical system.

Combining Classic Blend, VisualWorks Smalltalk and Oracle, the application loads 50+ concurrent users on a single standard processor (200 megahertz Pentium Pro) and performs various transactions on an Oracle database. Conducted over the Internet to a remote server located in Cary, North Carolina, client machines at the test lab in Cary and on-site at the product demonstration access the application performing update, remove and queries to the database. Client machines during the product demonstration will monitor the results of the test and interact with applications being serviced by that server.

The monitoring tools track the network message rate and database transaction rate as well as control the time between transactions. These rates are displayed in various forms (averages, maximum, current values, charts, graphs, etc.). The demonstration will indicate the average message rate per second (>150 msg/sec), average total transaction rate per second (nearly 100/sec), average application server CPU load, average database server CPU load and other measurements.

Developers or managers deploying in a distributed systems with application servers in an n-tier client/server or Internet environment will appreciate the importance of this scalability benchmarking application.