Member Article

The National Trust ensures high website performance in peak times with Borland

The National Trust, the UK charity that works to preserve and protect historic places and spaces, has deployed Silk Performer by Borland, a Micro Focus company (LSE: MCRO.L) to streamline performance testing across the organization. The solution provides high website performance during peak periods such as Easter or the school holidays when it can receive up to 100,000 hits per hour, plus it delivers early identification and prevention of potential performance issues.

Silk Performer also supports the National Trust’s Oracle CRM system, which holds the details of its membership and is accessed by call center staff who carry out administrative work such as processing changes to details and membership payments. In peak times, up to 300 people use the CRM system concurrently and so a robust set of performance tests is needed to support the CRM system’s various upgrades and changes, which have included functional changes around its membership creation processes.

Commenting on the implementation, Stephen Jenkins, Performance Test Consultant at National Trust, said: “As a charity, the National Trust depends on its supporters and, as the main communication tool, the website is vital. It is constantly updated to reflect new activities and events at National Trust properties. On a regular basis these changes are tested to ensure that the website’s overall performance hasn’t been affected.

Continuing, Stephen said: “Silk Performer has made it easy for us to replicate the potential website traffic volumes in a test simulation. We’ve lost track of the number of times we’ve identified and fixed a potential performance issue in the testing process, preventing it from becoming a problem on the live site.”

The ease of test scripting, the ability to simulate various network speeds, and high level of protocol support is also useful in supporting the National Trust’s internal applications. The organization has been able to include all of its core legacy systems into the new performance testing process.

“The user experience is vitally important to the charity and so response times are carefully monitored,” added Stephen. “The Borland solution enables intuitive script creation and easy script changes, supports AJAX, which is used on our website, and provides very accurate page rendering information, which is useful for the team to understand the potential impact of graphical changes to the site. Through Silk Performer, we have introduced a well-structured performance regression path which can be run with very little script change.”

“Performance testing is imperative for applications to perform as expected in the real world,” said Archie Roboostoff, Borland Solutions Portfolio Director at Micro Focus. “Website downtime can potentially cost millions of dollars in lost revenue. If your website delivers a poor experience, 79% of online customers say they’re unlikely to buy from the site again. Meanwhile, 47% of consumers expect to wait no more than two seconds for a web page to render. By implementing a performance testing solution via the cloud, organizations can more effectively and affordably manage heavy loads on their website and maximize all sales and reputation-building opportunities.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by James Pleass .