Testing and Evaluation of a Hierarchical SOAP based Medical Web Service

Abstract

Performance testing of hierarchical web service communications is essential from the perspective of users as well as developers, since it directly reflects the behavior of the service. As such we have developed a SOAP based research web service, suitable for online medical services to study the performance and to evaluate the technique used for developing the service. We call the service as MedWS (prototype research medical web service). Load and stress testing have been carried out on MedWS using Mercury Load Runner to study the performance, stability, scalability and efficiency of the service. The performance depends on metrics such as hits/sec, response time, throughput, errors/s and transaction summary. These metrics are tested with different stress levels. The statistical analysis on the recorded data has been carried out to study the stability and quality of the application. The present study reveals that the SOAP based web service which has been developed with Java programming language is stable, scalable and effective. We present here the architecture, testing procedure, results of performance testing as well as the results of statistical analysis on recorded data of MedWS.