SCT Banner Performance Tuning and Load Testing

Heavy workload periods such as registration can tax even well designed Banner database systems and strain the patience of students, faculty and administrators. Painfully slow response times, browser timeouts and unknown error messages only add the stress. Unfortunately, solving these and other temporary performance problems is difficult. The bottlenecks occur and then go away. Monitoring the system components during heavy times can pinpoint the trouble spots, but it is difficult to adjust system components and measure for response improvement during the heavy load.

Cnetics Technologies has developed a load testing and tuning service that will simulate heavy activity. By configuring load-testing software to reproduce registration activities, we can simulate hundreds or thousands of virtual users. During the load, measurements can be taken on the database, the database machine, the application server, the application server machine and the network. As a bottleneck is displayed in one of the system components, that component can be adjusted. Once the component is adjusted, the test can be run again to determine if the adjustment improved the response time. Since different types of load will often tax system components in different ways, we will run a variety of test scenarios to analyze the system for performance problems during heavy activity.

If your Banner database is not running smoothly and efficiently, especially during heavy workloads, give Cnetics a call. We can substantially increase its performance and reduce your headaches.