IBM Rational Performance Tester helps USOpen.org serve millions of visitors confidently

For two weeks each summer, fans and players from around the world gather in Queens, N.Y. for the US Open – the last of four Grand Slam tennis tournaments played annually. With record-setting attendance of more than 700,000, the US Open is the highest-attended annual sporting event in the world. USOpen.org, the official tournament Web site powered by IBM, served millions of additional fans around the world with news, scores, analysis, and video programming. The site attracted more than 30 million visits, with more than half of the visitors coming from outside the United States. Fans come to US Open expecting to see serves at a blistering pace; when they come to USOpen.org they expect the information to be served just as fast.

Challenge: Throughout the year, the USOpen.org Web site handles a steady stream of traffic from tennis fans, players, sponsors, and journalists around the world. During the tournament, however, traffic surges to record-highs each year. For the United States Tennis Association (USTA) tournament organizers, ensuring all of those visitors are happy with the experience is paramount because the site is a prominent reflection of their brand. Partnering for more than a decade to produce the US Open Web site, the USTA and IBM needed to make certain that visitors to USOpen.org would be served reliably and quickly by ensuring the site could handle more than 50 times its everyday traffic.

Solution: Prior to the tournament, webmasters from the IBM Global Technology Services team used IBM Rational Performance Tester to validate the end-to-end performance and scalability of USOpen.org and ensure the site would be able to handle the anticipated surge in traffic.

IBM hosts the USOpen.org Web site from three geographically distributed datacenters, each designed to support up to half of the total expected USOpen.org traffic. Using Rational Performance Tester, the team created, executed, and analyzed tests to verify the performance and capacity of each datacenter.

To implement a realistic user load, the group recorded a browsing scenario and a search scenario that simulated user interaction with the Web site. They then mixed the two scenarios at various percentages to emulate different traffic patterns. “With Rational Performance Tester, recording tests was simple, and the scenarios were quickly and easily configured,” notes John Kent, Program Manager at IBM.

The team required no specialized hardware or extensive tool training to create and execute the tests. Using just two standard PCs running Windows XP, the team generated almost 25,000 hits per minute (more than 400 hits per second) to a single node.

“Rational Performance Tester enabled us to rapidly record different browsing scenarios, adjust the mix of scenarios to create workloads, and generate thousands of hits per minute. We gathered lots of data points in a short period of time and saw how the site would perform under a heavy user load. We were confident that the visitors to the USOpen.org Web site would have an exceptionally responsive visit, because we had verified the site’s performance with Rational Performance Tester,” Kent concludes.

The more than 30 million visits to USOpen.org during the tournament included more than 7 million unique visitors and represented an 11% increase over the previous year. Although the site attracted more visitors than ever before, the close to 25,000 hits per minute generated by Rational Performance Tester was far more than any single node saw in actual operation.

Benefits:

• Gained confidence in system performance by generating and validating user loads at 25,000 hits per minute
• Site served more than 30 million visitors flawlessly
• Increased tester productivity by automating creation of load testing scenarios and workloads