From Hundreds to Thousands: Scaling MEFA Pathway Software for Mass Student Registration

Anastasia Ostapenko

FolderWave, Inc. is a leading digital services provider in the Massachusetts e-learning sector. It aids millions of students in researching and planning a job-oriented education.

The company delivers IT solutions, platforms, and services in partnership with notable non-profit organizations like MEFA Pathway and College Board, which connect a vast network of colleges, schools, and universities across the US.

Challenge

The educational process is cyclical, which causes lots of students to create portfolios, plan study budgets and consider their career paths at the beginning of academic terms. For that, students use FolderWave partners’ systems, putting them under significant strain.

The company’s business model heavily relies on the number of active users on the platform, and with the global shift to online learning after COVID-19, FolderWave has been exponentially increasing its target audience.

Every September, FolderWave expects at least 1,000 students to register simultaneously on the MEFA Pathway service following major online events. Moreover, a similar volume of questionnaire completions is being uploaded on the College Board system. Any failure in these critical e-learning systems could severely impact the company’s reputation and its financial standing.

Solution

To address this challenge, Bob Burke, president and co-founder of FolderWave, hired a PFLB performance and load testing team to emulate two typical user scenarios that happen annually. 

The FolderWave team, understanding their new users’ interaction with the services, predicted peak user load at College Board and asked PFLB to emulate the load of 1,000 questionnaire submissions per hour. Then, in 2023, FolderWave went back to PFLB to test the other service – MEFA Pathway and see if 800 emulated users could register on the platform within 5 minutes.

Results

Last September, PFLB engineers conducted initial performance testing using the PFLB platform and then shared access to the test results with the FolderWave team. PFLB cloud service enabled FolderWave’s team to repeat tests multiple times on their own to optimize the configuration for expected loads.

FolderWave’s team discovered that the basic configuration of one of the services needed adjustments due to high response times under stress conditions. Then, the engineers carried out a root cause analysis and made timely performance optimizations.

This proactive performance tracking of the company’s e-learning IT services ensured that they successfully managed the peak load.

Benefits

Timely load testing strengthened FolderWave’s reputation as a reliable e-learning service provider for both partners and students, while outsourcing the testing process saved FolderWave’s engineers valuable time.

The cloud-based load testing tool from PFLB provided quick results without compromising security, allowing for repeatable testing to consistently track and resolve issues.

About PFLB

PFLB is a cloud-based load testing solution and services that help businesses identify and fix performance issues on time. PFLB has proven efficient across various industries, including e-learning. For more information about our capabilities, please, contact sales.