The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) recently launched an interactive online map showing comparisons between crime figures across England and Wales. The new site pulls together information from police force web sites on overall crime levels, with specifics on burglary, robbery, violence, vehicle crime and anti-social behaviour data. But such was the popularity of the site, visitors found it difficult to access the map because it was loading so slowly.

Fortunately, the NPIA was able to address the problem rapidly and their crime maps are now functioning well. Whatever the reasons behind the issues the NPIA faced with the new site, they are not unique – when new applications are deployed or existing software is upgraded, performance is often overlooked, for any of a number of reasons. Sometimes, load estimates are just high enough – this is probably the case with the NPIA site.

The most common source of performance problems, however, is the mistaken belief that load testing can simply be bypassed because adding more hardware will deal with the issue. In fact, performance bottlenecks are rarely eliminated by increasing hardware specifications, as the problems are often rooted in custom code or application integration interfaces.

Also, in these times of tight budgets, justifying any purchase is difficult. Investment in performance testing software, with the depth of functionality and quality to give you the confidence your applications will perform under pressure, preventing damage to your business and reputation, just might be out of reach for some organisations. In these circumstances, rather than abandon the test altogether, or use a software tool that may only go part way to delivering the results you need, StarBase can offer an alternative – performance testing with software as a service.

Given the potential damage to your business if your application doesn’t perform (loss of productivity, revenue and, ultimately, customers, with a knock-on effect from adverse media attention and damage to your brand), you need to make sure you deliver best practice performance testing. Whether you need to performance test for the first time or you have a regular ongoing requirement StarBase has a solution.

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Click here to see how you can achieve that without the hassle or cost usually associated with getting it right.

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