Introduction

Scalability is one of the major concerns when developing web applications. Each web application must be able to serve multiple users. The number of users can vary depending on the type of application. An application designed for a small intranet may be targeted by 10–50 concurrent users at most, while an internet web application has to serve more than 500–1000 simultaneous users.

To make sure your web application is ready for deployment in a multi-user production environment, you should execute several tests. First, analyze the resource usage.

Scalability means the ability of your project to scale up when the number of sessions increases in a real world system. A scalable web app should use several techniques to manage and use system resources in the most efficient way possible. For example, if each of your sessions consumes ~1000 KB of memory (~1 MB), running 400 sessions will require at least 400 MB of physical/virtual memory to run properly. However, if each session consumes more than 10 MB, then it is easy for your app to run out of memory when there are more than 100 active sessions. Other system resources such as CPU, disk space, and database connections need to be taken into account.

For developers, it may not be an easy task to simulate a production environment on their desktop. Your app could be running flawlessly serving a few sessions but could start suffering from exhausting resources and scalability issues when the number of sessions increases above a certain threshold. uniGUI includes the Stress Test Tool to help deal with such scalability issues. This tool aims to simulate a multi-user environment right on your desktop. The Stress Test Tool is located under the ..\uniGui\Utils\StressTestTool folder, and it is deployed with full source code so that it can be customized by developers if needed. This tool introduces many advanced features which enable developers to simulate a production environment under heavy load.