ACT! Premium for Web Scalability Tests

Rex

ACT! Premium for Web is a browser-based application. Users access a centralized Web application server. In ACT! Premium for Web, most of the processing work occurs on the Web application server or the SQL Server (database server).
To extend ACT! Premium for Web scalability for testing, organizations can use multiple virtual pools on the application server and multiple Web application servers with a single Microsoft SQL Server. In this setup, a load balancer is often employed to spread users evenly over the application servers. The following diagram shows an architectural overview of this approach

Users’ requests pass through a network load balancer (Figure 5), which distributes users to an appropriate application server. These application servers in turn access the SQL Server, which houses the ACT! Premium for Web database(s).

Virtual Directories and Pools
In Microsoft IIS 6.0 – 7.0 you can create multiple virtual directories, each with their own virtual pool, to increase a server’s ability to serve more concurrent users accessing the ACT! Premium for Web application. With these individual virtual directories, the Windows OS can take advantage of more RAM memory and extend the server’s scalability. Sage recommends creating a virtual pool for every
50 concurrent users that will access the software.

 

The ACT! Premium for Web scalability tests performed placed a simulated user load of 200 users per application server to a single SQL Server. These tests reached a maximum of 600 users, spread over three application servers.

As shown in the chart, CPU usage maintained an average of 25% and memory averaged 51% for
200 users.

In the ACT! Premium for Web database, CPU and memory measurements remained low throughout the test, reaching an average of 9% for the CPU and 14% for memory for 600 users.