Today’s workday went much as expected – crazy. It’s the heaviest day for our applications, which means a whole lot of people trying to get through the necessary reset of their credentials (necessary because changing user management system plus one-way encryption = you must reset your password) – based on login records in the older software I’d guesstimated the likely maximum to be about 500 users/hour in the system. Today’s max was more like 800. I’m not sure if this is because it’s easier to pull the data or because the old system didn’t capture as much as the new one does.

In any case, I discovered some things that will be exceedingly useful to me as a tester – and will probably find their way into my writing somewhere, albeit in an unrecognizable form.

It turns out that IIS starts to have… issues… when there are more than 150 users using the same application pool at the same time. Thankfully we were able to split this in a way that stopped the performance of that application from heading down the S bend. It still needs some performance tweaking, but at least it’s not at the level of “click the button. Make a cuppa. It might be done loading the page by the time you’re back with your cuppa.”

Apparently that and network bandwidth are our killers. Seems like we’ll be pushing harder to get the internet line to the workplace upgraded soon, as well as getting a move to one of the cloud providers going. One that does automatic smart load balancing.

So of course, when I got home I went out and shot things. Namely (mostly) the target with the new bow. I missed a few times so shot the grass, but most of my shots got the target. A decent number of them got the circles. I’m happy, and nursing a nice big bruise on my right arm where the bowstring clipped me a couple of times.