High BU-Count Server Performance Testing Projects

eValid users are already aware of the use of multiple eValid instances -- called Browser Users (BUs) -- to generate 100% realistic load on servers. Each BU runs as a separate Windows process, and each can handle very complex applications including AJAX and database-related applications.

To get high BU counts requires that we use two methods:

• The first method involves making OS parameter changes to increase the size of the virtual memory, increase the desktop heap size, and change the performance option to optimize for background operations.
• Even with these adjustments, each desktop user still runs up against a limit on the number of GDI Objects per user session. To overcome this constraint, we open additional user accounts on the driver machine.

Using EC2 cloud machines to drive very heavy BU-count loads, we usually employ 8-core High-Memory and/or High-CPU machine images. One such machine, properly configured, yields 1,000+ BUs per machine depending on the test duty-cycle and machine resource use. All of these methods come together in our PerformanceTest projects, which offer load generation up to 100,000 BUs in parallel,