Summary

A large and innovative distributed testing system was experiencing scalability and performance issues resulting in incomplete operation and random errors.

As a management intervention for that project , the client requested a theoretical review of the system architecture based on documentation available regarding the system functionality and operation.

The Project

The system was review by our consultant based only on documents (without access to the code or debugging options, etc.). A theoretical investigation of the process and data flow between component servers was conducted.

The review uncovered bottlenecks identified where high loads caused unqueued network communication between system component servers resulted in lost messages and therefore caused partial operation and malfunction due to lost information.

Benefits

Our consultant could identify a major contributor to system instabilty with minimal involvement of the development team themselves and based only on existing documentation.

• Root Cause of the malfunction identified
• Resolution paths found based on that error
• Unblocked development and operation