BEA WebLogic boosts NCFM

NSE.IT used BEA WebLogic to improve the scalability of the NCFM examination system. Today it uses the same architecture to host exams for IITs

INCORPORATED in 1992, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) is India's leading stock exchange by turnover.
One of NSE's top priorities is to ensure that people running terminals have a minimum level of competence for which a system of testing and certification is essential. That's where the NSE Certification in Financial Markets (NCFM) Web-based examination system comes into the picture. It is used to test the knowledge of staff about the securities industry and trading rules.

"People running terminals had to have a minimum level of competence for which certification was required. It was not practical to run exams in multiple regions," says G M Shenoy, NSE.IT's senior vice-president for IT operations, outlining the problem NSE's IT wing faced at the beginning. Capitalising on the fact that its offices across the country were networked, NSE.IT went in for a Web-based solution that generates parameterised questions on the fly, thus ensuring a rigorous and impartial system.
Earlier, NSE.IT was using a Sun Ultra Server (167 MHz, 640 MB running Solaris 2.5) to run its Perl-CGI system that supported a maximum of 30-40 concurrent users. There were other problems as well.

• The response time was slow.
• There was no detailed accou-nting system.
• The existing system wouldn't support additional test modules.

Says Aniruddha Joshi, project leader in the development team that worked on the new system, "The old NCFM system was built using Perl programmes that would read data from an Oracle database. It was very slow, would consume over 70 percent of CPU resources, and could not handle more than 50 candidates simultaneously. Candidates used to wait for over five minutes just to get the question-paper on to their screens."

Try before you buy

The BEA WebLogic J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition) application server was first evaluated by NSE.IT as a platform for its revamp of the NCFM system. "Either the customer downloads the free evaluation copy or we give them the software for thirty days. They try it out, and once they decide to go ahead and use WebLogic in a project, we step in with developer training for four to five days," says Srikant Rao, country manager, India, BEA systems.
Thus, BEA provided support during the trial period. The project was initiated in November 2002. Once the decision to go ahead was made, BEA developer training consisting of Java basics and WebLogic functions from a developer perspective was imparted to 15-20 developers from NSE.IT working on several projects, including NCFM. A BEA consultant helped conduct a stress test before the project went live. Remote support was offered to NSE.IT in terms of code review and auditing.
"The users were initially worried. To satisfy them, we used an open source tool called The Grinder to benchmark concurrent user logins and question-paper download times," says Shenoy. The Grinder is a Java-based, open-source load generation and performance measurement framework that generates load by simulating client requests to an application and measures how well the application copes with that load. NSE.IT found that using WebLogic on an IBM x345 cluster (2.8 GHz, 2 GB RAM) would let it support 500 concurrent users. The new system has a JSP (Java Server Pages) front-end while the business components (EJBs or Enterprise JavaBeans) are hosted on the BEA WebLogic application server.
It makes optimum use of the Oracle database by means of connection pooling. The BEA WebLogic application server creates a pool of connections and keeps them alive, thus improving application performance. In the old Perl-CGI system, connections were made and dropped resulting in the hardware and database requirements scaling up dramatically as the number of users rose. WebLogic can support twenty users on each connection to the database. "They can serve more users with the same hardware and database sizing, or use less powerful hardware for handling the same number of users," explains Rao.
The response time has plummeted from five minutes to five seconds. Candidates using the new system can download a question-paper over a dial-up connection in less than 20 seconds. Scorecards are computed and transmitted in 25 seconds or less. The detailed accounting and voucher entry systems connect to the core application.
NSE.IT invested around Rs 30 lakh, including the cost of acquiring hardware, keeping four people on the project, Oracle licence changes,and infrastructure, including networking.

Phased switchover

The system went live on February 24, 2003, when NSE.IT released the system to users, and user acceptance testing was conducted. For some time, both systems ran side-by-side, hosting different exams. Data was gradually migrated from the old server to the new cluster. Initially, links to old data were mapped to the old server, while requests for new data were retrieved from the cluster. Over time, as tables were moved across, more links began to point to the x345.
The system uses Oracle's in-built security features to assign rights based upon the roles of users. Some can only view data, while others, on the business side, are able to insert and update records. Since the examinations are conducted either at the NSE's centres across the country or overseen by its invigilators, SSL encryption was not felt necessary. "It is a timed test. There is no way to do any tampering afterwards," insists Shenoy. All system activities are logged and audited. As per the security policy, activity logs are sent to users for analysis.

Beyond NCFM

It's not just NCFM. NSE.IT offers the system to others as a managed service for online testing and certification. Insurance companies and IITs have now called upon NSE.IT to host their examinations online using the same system. Over one lakh candidates have been tested to date. It has been a successful implementation for NSE.IT both in terms of improving scalability and making a smooth transition to a new server
platform.