In the tests, Credient’s risk server handled over 200 simultaneously active dealers, processed approximately 12,000 new deals per hour using three processing servers on three single processor machines, and completed end-of-day processing in two and a half hours for a large portfolio of 500,000 deals.

With advanced analytic measures that deliver portfolio-wide exposure profiles in real-time over the life of the deal, the maximum throughput was 9000 deals per hour. With Credient linked to 16 remote dealers via an ISDN connection the results showed approximately 5000 deals per hour throughput. For each deal, the processing involves updating approximately 50 portfolio credit exposures and performing limit checks against them.

The 500,000-deal portfolio employed during testing was designed to resemble a typical client portfolio with FX forwards and FX spot trades each representing 40% of the portfolio and options the remaining 20%. The foundation data set created to support the deals consisted of 2,000 counterparties, 24 primary currencies, 16 countries, 27 cities and five industries.

The tests were performed over five days and thousands of deals were processed without system failure or the need to restart components, says SunGard.

The vendor attributes the performance to Credient's n-tier architecture, which keeps the database, application and presentation layers separate and enables it to operate resiliently in a high-performance, clustered environment.

Steve Husk, president of the Credient/Infinity operating unit, says: "As a hosted service Credient must be available to clients 24 hours a day, seven days a week. At the same time it must be expected to process many transactions per hour."

The tests were conducted over MS Windows 2000 Server Advanced, Microsoft Application Center 2000 and MS SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. The hardware used during these tests were Dell Poweredge 6300 Server and Compaq Proline 8500 using Intel’s Xeon processors.