News Corporation were implementing the first version of their mass SMS Mobile Text Messaging Gateway.
Our mission: To increase performance of SMS text messaging content subscription service from 2 to 50+ incoming and outgoing messages per second.
We designed and configured an active/passive cluster using Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. This enabled a very high level of performance, 24 x 7 x 365, with the ability to take any server out of service for maintenance without affecting the service level of the system as a whole.
Then we set about analysing the existing application code, identifying inefficient code and substantially rewriting it. Where necessary, we undertook appropriate database re-indexing.
As a result, the application exceeded 50 transactions per second for 80% of the scenarios tested, and in the case of the remaining 20% of test scenarios, our improvements resulted in a 15-fold increase in performance.