Performance analysis - Performance research and load simulation of a web based Business Intelligence system

Abstract: The need for Business Intelligence (BI) systems becomes more and more important and the number of users of such systems increases with the need. A larger number of users places greater demands on system performance. ExOpen Systems AB (ExOpen) has received complaints on performance of their web based BI system, ExOpen Web Reports, from both employees and customers. The purpose of the project is to give ExOpen deeper knowledge of the performance of their system and recommendations which can lead to higher performance. The project includes a study on suitable performance parameters to measure. The parameters are measured with a standard tool for performance measuring. An application for simulating users of ExOpen Web Reports is developed. The application has the ability to simulate a work load on the system, by simulating a number of users and specific tasks. In consultation with the development department at ExOpen a number of simulation scenarios are designed. Each scenario is run with the simulation application and the performance parameters are measured during the simulations. The simulation results is analyzed and compared with existing recommendations for the performance parameters. As a result there is a clear relationship between more users and lower performance, such as longerresponse times. A task that has a response time of 3 seconds for one single user takes over 5 minutes when there are 40 active users. Neither the network nor the server memory are bottlenecks during the simulations. The harddrive is a bottleneck and the processor works at full capacity during the highest system load of the project. The resource utilization of the web server increases with the number of active users. On the contrary the database server adjusts its utilization of resources according to available resources. The conclusions in the project are based on relatively few measurements. More simulations should be made in order to give accurate recommendations according software and hardware configurations. In particular such simulations and experiments where the number of threads available for the web application varies. To optimize the source code for performance simulations should be made where the developers of ExOpen Web Reports are directly involved.