SOASTA (www.soasta.com), and M-Dot Network (www.mdotnetwork.com) announced the successful completion of an unprecedented 1,000,000-user performance test using SOASTA's CloudTest On-Demand service. The test was run from the SOASTA Global Test Cloud against the M-Dot transaction application, which is deployed in Amazon EC2. CloudTest's comprehensive analytics, displayed and updated as the test was running, identified points of stress in their architecture in real time.

The M-Dot Network platform enables consumers to receive digital coupons via a retailer's web site or micro-web site on their mobile phone. Consumers can find and select coupons online or on their mobile phone. Offers are aggregated and presented directly to consumers from multiple third party digital coupon issuers and from the retailer.

"Our initial testing with SOASTA had proven incredibly valuable in helping us accurately simulate, measure and analyze our expected transaction volumes," said Mike Kavis, CTO, M-Dot. "Leveraging the cloud to test for potential spikes took it to another level, since demonstrating high performance and scalability is critical to the success of our micropayment processing platform. It is vital that we process all transactions in milliseconds so that we do not negatively impact the consumer's shopping experience or slow down the checkout process. This test helped us validate that our platform could sustain the demand of a network with over 200,000 stores sending concurrent transactions from a million different endpoints. With the CloudTest service there was no learning curve and SOASTA easily met our schedule."

The 1,000,000-user test spanned two sessions, each taking approximately 4 hours. On the first day the scenarios used in the initial M-Dot testing were validated at peak transaction rates, which also uncovered load balancer configuration issues. The goal was reached early on day two, using an aggressive ramp to stress the system. Average response time was 103ms, reflecting the speed required for a user redeeming coupons at checkout.

Due to CloudTest's event-based, massively parallel, multi-threaded architecture, only 587 load and result servers were required to reach the target user count. Using the SOASTA Global Test Cloud, all of the servers were provisioned and ready to test in less than 10 minutes. The efficiency of the platform dramatically reduced the challenges associated with the preparation and execution of a test this large.

As a full-service offering, SOASTA's customers simply describe the web user business process, such as logging in to an account, executing a transaction, or browsing content. SOASTA's team of experienced performance engineers build the tests, provision the complete cloud environment, execute the tests, and work with customers in real-time to analyze, fix and tune a site's performance.

"We're enabling a new way of testing by leveraging the virtual resources of cloud computing," said Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA. "A load test of this scale has never been done before, not to mention so quickly and affordably. As companies such as M-Dot Network continue to grow their web traffic with compelling, consumer-facing applications, cloud testing has emerged as the only viable, web-scale alternative to traditional load and performance testing."