Report for March 2013

Report Date

March 2013

Achievements in Last Period

• PoC undertaken in BETA environment.  Dev Tech, GaSP and Roslin have been testing the Pure web services.  Roslin were able to update their local websites by using the Pure web services (via scheduled calls and running services from their local cache).  Dev Tech monitored the infrastructure performance to understand the impact on the Pure application.

• During March we have performed the same test in the Production environment.  Again Dev Tech have been monitoring the performance and have reported similar results to those found on TEST.  A high load was simulated, as if several sites were using the web services as part of the page content. Once the test had ramped up to full load, response times from the Roslin site increased to very high levels - however, no page requests failed. At this point James informed Dev Tech that the main PURE application was failing, so testing was stopped.The initial recommendation is that overnight updates using the web services are likely to be fine but web service hits per page request is not.  Dev Tech also stated that, as the main limiter seems to be from the application tier (the database tier showed hardly any impact), it may be worth looking further into the possibility of splitting out the web services into a separate server.

• The aim of the project is to allow technical users in Schools to build their local web sites using data from the Pure web services.   Before this can be done we need to ensure that there are no performance implications, and then we will need to have the basic authentication in place to slowly roll out use to the Schools.

Issues

• Milestones revised due to business partner and technical resource availability..

Next Steps

• Dev Tech to write up results from PoC and confirm recomendations.

• Complete project brief based on outcomes of PoC.