I’m doing some load-testing for our service, focusing first on the all-important Christmas Morning test: what happens when 50,000 people unwrap their presents, find your product, and try to hook it up. This was a fun one at WebTV, where every year we rented CPUs and memory for our Oracle server, and did a complicated load-balancing dance to support new subscribers while still giving decent response to current ones. [Note: it is remarkably useful to be able to throw your service into database-read-only mode and point groups of hosts at different databases.]

My first problem was deciphering the interface. I’ve never worked with WSDL before, and it turns out that the Perl SOAP::WSDL package has a few quirks related to namespaces in XSD schemas. Specifically, all of the namespaces in the XSD must be declared in the definition section of the WSDL to avoid “unbound prefix” errors, and then you have to write a custom serializer to reinsert the namespaces after wsdl2perl.pl gleefully strips them all out for you.

Once I could register one phony subscriber on the test service, it was time to create thousands of plausible names, addresses, and (most importantly) phone numbers scattered around the US. Census data gave me a thousand popular first and last names, as well as a comprehensive collection of city/state/zip values. Our CCMI database gave me a full set of valid area codes and prefixes for those zips. The only thing I couldn’t find a decent source for was street names; I’m just using a thousand random last names for now.

I’m seeding the random number generator with the product serial number, so that 16728628 will always be Elisa Wallace on W. Westrick Shore in Crenshaw, MS 38621, with a number in the 662 area code.

Over the next few days, I’m going to find out how many new subscribers I can add at a time without killing the servers, as well as how many total they can support without exploding. It should be fun.

Meanwhile, I can report that Preview.app in Mac OS X 10.5.4 cheerfully handles converting a 92,600-page PostScript file into PDF. It took about fifteen minutes, plus a few more to write it back out to disk. I know this because I just generated half a million phony subscribers, and I wanted to download the list to my Sony Reader so I could scan through the output. I know that all have unique phone numbers, but I wanted to see how plausible they look. So far, not bad.

The (updated! yeah!) Sony Reader also handles the 92,600-page PDF file very nicely.

[Update: I should note that the “hook it up” part I’m referring to here is the web-based activation process. The actual “50,000 boxes connect to our servers and start making phone calls” part is something we can predict quite nicely based on the data from the thousands of boxes already in the field.]