Academic Track Paper

This paper presents a load testing of the HELIDEM geo-portal, which is an example of interoperability between a numbers of standard geospatial services as defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium. The portal was developed within the European project HELIDEM (www.helidem.eu) with the aim of valorizing the main project output which is a cross-border digital terrain model. The portal aims at fostering its diffusion and usage trough easily accessible tools. The DTM covers the alpine area located between Southern Switzerland (Canton Ticino) and Northern Italy (Lombardy and Piedmont Regions). From a technological point of view, the server-side component of the portal is based on a Service Oriented Architecture implemented using the open source software Zoo-Project, GRASS GIS and Geoserver; the client-side component is a Web interface based on CSS3 and HTML5 trough the usage of the ExtJS framework and the OpenLayers software. The presented solution is a mix of technologies and software, some of which are considered, within the open source for geospatial community, mature and robust while others are considered promising but not sufficiently tested yet. For this reason this research conducted a load test over concurrent users in order to verify the robustness, quality and performance of the system and to identify eventual bottlenecks. Test results didn’t register any exception confirming the good quality of the implemented system and underlying software. Nevertheless, performance and response time exponentially degrades with increasing number of concurrent users, area of analysis and process complexity. Finally, the test confirms that system is robust, in fact no system failure was recorded during the analysis.