Infinite Campus has based our load testing on our largest district (335K students and 40K employees), simulating their peak usage, which happens during their grading windows. We evaluate their peak usage and always set the load testing targets at 150% of that usage. These tests are focused on the two largest groups of users: parents and students (accessing Campus Student and Campus Parent) and teachers (using Campus to score, grade, and take attendance). A smaller subset of tests also exist to simulate administrative tasks and are run concurrently with the user-focused tests. Our standard is to run the full suite of tests for an hour and then compare throughput to our targeted results, CPU, and Memory usage along with Database activity.
For example, one of our targets is to have 225,000 scoring and 300,000 grading updates per hour without performance issues. This test also simulates having 28,500 parents and students logging into Campus Parent and Campus Student and accessing most of the links within the Portal.
The hardware we use for our performance testing environment is a sixth of what the customer has in production. While we know there are other activities going on in production, we believe this is a good representation of data when evaluating performance of each Campus release.
Our load testing suite is run multiple times for each release of Campus. If a performance issue is uncovered during this testing we work to correct this before we ever ship the underperforming code to customers. Because we have been load testing for many years, we are able to use historical data to easily identify any discrepancies in results and address issues quickly and effectively. After the spring grading window we reset our targets to the current peak usage, if needed.
The results of our load tests can be made available upon request. Please contact your Infinite Campus Client Relationship Manager for more information. Thank you.