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| Reed.co.uk Prepares for Growth in 2008 with SciVisum reed.co.uk, one of the UK's largest recruitment web sites, has been using SciVisum's portfolio of web testing services to robustly trial web site performance on Microsoft's Windows Servers 2008. The server upgrade is a key component of an infrastructure investment programme, designed to support growth in 2008. Extensive load testing of the new operating system using a beta site allowed the company to identify and eliminate architecture-related performance issues before they could impact job seekers. Launched in February 1995, reed.co.uk is one of the largest commercial jobsites in the UK. In January 2008 the portal attracted 1.7 million unique users and generated 1.2 million job applications – an average of almost 40,000 a day. In the last six months reed.co.uk has made significant enhancements to the functionality of its website and the infrastructure that supports it. In September 2007 the company began migrating its systems to a new datacentre, and in November the website was upgraded to enable recruiters to search the registered applicant database. In order to grow its business-to-business division reed.co.uk introduced paid-for job ads, allowing companies to prioritise advertisements on the web site in exchange for a fee. Throughout this time, web testing was a critical part of the process, enabling the company to monitor site performance, prior, during, and after any changes to the system, while permitting a smooth transition. Microsoft's Windows Servers 2008 have been deployed to help the company achieve ambitious growth targets. To ensure that the new hardware could stand up to the massive demand from users, reed.co.uk ran a beta site on the new servers in parallel to the existing site running on the old servers. Using SciVisum's suite of testing applications, the beta site was load tested in line with concurrent user numbers; and after switching the live site to Server 2008, actual user journeys were tested 24/7 at an interval of five minutes. SciVisum's comprehensive testing of the beta sites break points revealed an issue with the architecture was making the site run at a speed that did not meet reed.co.uk's stringent performance criteria. SciVisum's testing consistently identified the error, enabling reed.co.uk's engineers to locate the source of the problem and fix it during the testing. write your comments about the article :: © 2008 Computing News :: home page |