Ensuring peak performance in banking and trading infrastructures: Real-world testing with LoadGen

In the high-stakes environment of banking and trading, every millisecond counts.

Financial institutions rely heavily on their Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to securely deliver critical business applications to thousands of employees. Downtime, delays, or performance issues directly translate into financial risk and potential reputational damage.

In this blog, we share insights from a real-world performance test conducted with LoadGen, showcasing its powerful capabilities in managing a complex, intensive workload across a large-scale Citrix VDI environment.

The test setup: a real-world scenario

4000 Virtual Users across 90 LoadGen Agents

• Hardware Specifications per Agent: Intel Gold processors, 16 vCPUs, 32GB memory

• Users were distributed across 8 separate Citrix desktop pools (a newly supported feature by LoadGen).

• Intensive banking workload involving multiple critical business applications, including ID verifications, processing sensitive financial operations, and everyday office tasks such as working with documents, spreadsheets, and PDF files (all simulations performed with anonymized test data).

  
  

Why LoadGen’s No-Code solution stands out

Creating intricate and realistic test scenarios typically requires extensive scripting knowledge, significantly slowing down the testing cycle. LoadGen’s no-code solution simplifies this:

• LoadGen Studio enables you to record complex business workflows effortlessly. Simply walk through your workflow, and LoadGen captures every interaction.

• Easily adjust scenarios visually, translating sophisticated financial processes into manageable and clear test scripts within hours rather than days.

Executing multiple intensive test scenarios

The test included multiple scenario configurations to reflect different realistic workloads and user login behaviors:

• Scenario 1:

  • 60% of users log in within 20 minutes (20 vUsers every 10 seconds)

  • Remaining 40% within the next 20 minutes (14 vUsers every 10 seconds)

• Scenario 2:

  • 50% of users log in within 30 minutes (11 vUsers every 10 seconds)

  • 60-minute idle waiting period

  • The remaining 50% of users log in within another 30 minutes (11 vUsers every 10 seconds)

These scenarios allowed LoadGen to accurately simulate peak usage periods, critical morning login spikes, and recovery periods, ensuring VDI performance under varying and realistic business conditions.

Real-time monitoring and immediate insights

During the test runs, LoadGen Analyzer provided continuous real-time performance data, complemented by the LoadGen Director, which offers an overview dashboard highlighting essential test metrics, including login status, remaining test duration, application successes, and failures, as well as measurement transaction successes and failures:

• Instantaneous tracking of user logins, response times, and throughput

• Immediate alerts and detailed dashboards pinpointed delays and application bottlenecks

• Proactively identifying performance degradations allowed swift corrective actions even before the test concluded.

Results and Impact

• LoadGen reliably identified performance thresholds and clearly showed how the Citrix environment handled peak user loads across multiple desktop pools.

• Precise visibility into latency and responsiveness at the GUI level provided confidence in the end-user experience.

• Significant reduction in time-to-test, thanks to LoadGen’s intuitive, no-code scenario creation, enabling rapid iterations and quick performance validations.

• Additionally, because screenshots can be automatically captured and sent from within user sessions, application errors encountered during testing can be immediately investigated and effectively addressed.

Conclusion: proven confidence under pressure

LoadGen’s real-world testing scenario for banking and trading demonstrates how financial institutions can confidently prepare for peak workloads, proactively manage performance risks, and consistently meet compliance standards. Through rigorous, scenario-driven testing that closely replicates real-world workloads, LoadGen uncovers potential performance bottlenecks and critical application errors before they affect end-users.

With built-in analytics and automated screenshot-based error reporting, teams can quickly pinpoint and resolve issues, significantly enhancing operational stability and efficiency. By leveraging LoadGen’s sophisticated yet straightforward no-code testing capabilities, financial IT departments can substantially decrease their troubleshooting burden, freeing resources to concentrate on strategic optimization and innovation initiatives.

Interested in learning how LoadGen can elevate your banking or trading infrastructure performance?

Discover LoadGen’s extensive testing features today and confidently ensure your VDI solution delivers consistent, flawless performance—even under the most intense workloads and challenging scenarios.