Case study: How RevDeBug helped BSB take 80 times less to significantly improve its application’s performance
About BSB
BSB, which was founded in 1974, is an IT company with a great tradition. Having been involved in laying down the foundations of the banking IT infrastructure in Poland, it’s still at the forefront of driving innovation in banking technology. It was designated as a company of strategic national importance and its sole shareholder is the National Bank of Poland.
BSB specializes in creating comprehensive IT solutions for the banking (in particular, interbank settlements, reporting, and automatic fraud detection), insurance, financial and public sectors.
Why BSB decided to work with RevDeBug
Although RevDeBug can easily find bugs, the tool’s Profiler can also help you also locate bottlenecks and analyze the performance of an application based on a historical recording.
The conception of RevDeBug’s Profiler and the automatic masking of sensitive data were tightly tied to how BSB was using our reverse debugger. The idea originated with BSB’s needs: it was implemented for the company first, and battle-tested on one of its top-priority banking applications.
During one of our conversations, Artur Szatkowski, the Head of Development in BSB, asked us an intriguing question:
“If you could have all the data and values, could you show us how it all changed in time?”
Our answer was an immediate yes. This was one of the ideas that we’d come up with before but we didn’t know how useful it could be to our clients.
How RevDeBug helped BSB reduce time spent on application performance improvement
We then promptly implemented the idea, and at the next meeting with Leszek Lewandowski, the Head of the .NET development team, we were able to demonstrate the new functionality.
Leszek wanted to test it right away and decided to do so on an application that needed performance improvements named obligo.XBRL, created solely by BSB.
The app implemented the XBRL reporting guidelines defined in the FINREP and COREP taxonomies prepared by the National Bank of Poland, following EU standards developed by the Committee of European Supervisors. The XBRL mandate also supported consolidated reporting processes within the group.
The app does a lot of data processing—it calculates and establishes relationships between lots of values, which results in a geometric progression of complexity while the application is extended.
One session of processing of the client’s data took over 90 min to complete, which was beyond an acceptable range. An analysis conducted with RevDeBug Profiler gave us immediate insight into where the application spent the most time.
Apart from the top-view presentation of profiling data, the execution frequency for each line of code was indicated in the editor window. This feature also helped with the analysis.
RevDeBug’s cooperation with BSB: the achieved results
Having data on bottlenecks readily available, optimizing system structure was easy. Leszek Lewandowski best described the final effect:
“Before, it took 90 minutes; now, it works in 15 seconds.“
He explained how RevDeBug helped him achieve this result:
“With such a complicated application, normally I would have searched for the cause for at least five days. With RevDeBug, it took me 2 hours. Great job!”
With RevDebug, it took Leszek 80 times less to significantly improve the application’s performance.
In the next step, BSB will roll out RevDeBug to use with its SPERT and SWPF applications, where it will help to find bugs by remotely recording web applications on a staging environment.