Proactive Load Tests of Redesigned Web Sites Helped Find and Fix Performance Bottlenecks
LEXINGTON, Mass., June 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc. (NYSE: DTG) is ready for the peak summer car rental season, thanks to proactively load testing its two redesigned Web sites using solutions from Gomez, Inc. (www.gomez.com), the leader in Web application experience management. The on-demand load tests revealed performance bottlenecks that Dollar Thrifty remedied prior to rolling out its new sites in time for its busiest season.
The www.dollar.com and www.thrifty.com sites had both undergone significant redesigns to personalize and optimize the online rental car experience. With significant revenue generated from its Web sites, Dollar Thrifty needed to be certain the redesigned sites would perform optimally for all customers under peak loads that exceeded previous volumes.
Given the complexities of its Web applications, Dollar Thrifty needed a solution that could test how its multi-tiered sites performed under load from its customers' perspective. It chose Gomez's service because it tests from the 'outside-in,' the only way to preview how all the components of a Web application, including third party content and services, perform under load and to find potential performance problems anywhere in the complex Web application delivery chain. Gomez does this by uniquely combining load generated from the cloud with load generated from the Gomez Last Mile(TM) network of 80,000 desktops. This approach meant Dollar Thrifty could create real-world, production-equivalent loads and preview how its web experience would scale under these conditions across all key markets.
The test did indeed expose a number of specific issues. It revealed an imbalance in capacity between the two sites and exposed that network traffic was in some cases being driven to legacy systems. Thanks to these insights, Dollar Thrifty reallocated servers and adjusted load balancing and successfully launched its Web sites.
'The performance of our Web sites is key to profitability, especially during the summer season,' said Charlie Coniglio, Dollar Thrifty's Vice President of Marketing and eCommerce. 'Given the investments we made in their redesign and our commitment to delivering the best online car rental experience, we had to load test, without a doubt.
