Back in 2008, the leading social platform has faced a significant challenge. Their new chat application has to be released to over 75 million active users. They won’t risk running into massive performance issues.
From a performance perspective, the performance killer of a chat solution is not the number of messages being sent. It’s rather keeping each online user aware of the state of their friends so that the communication can begin.
The team decided to integrate a toggling feature which enabled this social platform provider to release the new program to a restricted group of internal employees. As they faced no severe performance clash, they decided to start a dark launch in which the chat solution was entirely invisible for all 75 million users. The crux was that the chat program communicated in the background, invisible for their actual users.
Every user of this social platform was part of a massive load testing program, and the developers had enough time to eliminate identified performance pitfalls.
Takeaway If you don’t have enough time or infrastructure to load test your system on pre-production stages, a dark launch and load injection by your real user community is an excellent opportunity to identify and fix performance hotspots before your customer’s gets affected.
Keep doing the good things. Happy Performance Testing!
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