Your technology solution may perform well in development. The real test comes when traffic increases, workloads change, or a customer expects it to meet specific performance requirements. For Canadian startups and scaleups, answering those questions with confidence often requires more than in-house resources allow. 

CENGN Performance Testing Services provide access to enterprise-level testing infrastructure and expertise to validate the reliability, speed, and accuracy of solutions under real-world workloads and stress conditions. Startups and scaleups can access a secure,custom cloud environment without building and maintaining their own dedicated testing infrastructure. 
 
The service supports performance testing across a full range of technology solutions, including network solutions and software applications.  

And right now, that access is funded. CENGN Performance Testing Services are currently available through validation projects that include over eight weeks of testing time on the CENGN Datacentre, up to $250,000 in funding, and hands-on support from CENGN’s technical experts.  

When Performance Becomes a Technology Requirement 

As a technology solution moves toward deployment or a larger customer, the performance questions get more specific: how many users or connections can it support, how does it respond to sudden traffic increases, how much infrastructure does it require, and can it maintain performance over time? These are difficult to answer through development testing alone. 

Performance testing provides controlled conditions to measure how a solution behaves as workloads change, helping identify bottlenecks, determine infrastructure requirements, and validate whether it meets defined performance targets. 

What Can Performance Testing Validate? 

The right performance testing approach depends on what a company needs to validate. CENGN Performance Testing Services support the following testing types: 

• Load Testing simulates real user traffic to measure how a technology solution performs as demand increases and identify the point at which performance begins to change. 

• Resource Utilization Testing measures CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network usage under different workloads to identify where infrastructure can be right-sized without compromising performance. 

• Stress Testing pushes a technology solution beyond normal operating conditions across messaging queues, databases, and APIs to identify performance limits and areas for improvement. 

• Endurance (Soak) Testing applies a sustained workload over extended periods to reveal performance degradation, memory leaks, or failures that may not appear during shorter tests. 

• Scalability Testing examines how a technology solution responds as demand changes, including how quickly its infrastructure can add resources to maintain performance during traffic spikes. 

• Throughput Testing measures how much data a technology solution can process without creating bottlenecks, by simulating high-volume data streams and monitoring the solution’s processing speed and system efficiency. 

• Latency Testing measures how quickly a technology solution responds to user requests across network, API, and database components, including under challenging network conditions. 

• Security Performance Testing simulates transactions involving authentication, encryption, or other security features to determine whether security requirements are creating performance constraints.

Performance Testing in Practice 

Two Canadian companies show how performance testing translates into decisions that companies can act on. 

PerfectlySoft Inc. used CENGN infrastructure to benchmark its Perfect web server against eight competing web servers, measuring CPU utilization, requests processed under different scenarios, and response times across a range of request sizes and types. The testing environment included two bare-metal servers, three JMeter traffic generators, Zabbix for resource monitoring, and PostgreSQL for results storage. 

During the project, PerfectlySoft was able to make product adjustments and test the changes immediately. Through continuous reconfiguration, the company built a new version of its web server that outperformed the original in nearly every aspect tested and outcompeted the other web servers on requests handled per second and client capacity. PerfectlySoft noted that running the same tests independently would not have been feasible given the infrastructure and client traffic requirements involved. 

Aterlo Networks, a networking company, needed to validate that its Preseem appliance, a Quality of Experience (QoE) platform for Wireless Internet Service Providers, could handle throughput above 10 gigabits per second. That was a level of traffic the company could not generate or test on its own hardware. 

Working with CENGN’s engineers and traffic generators in a commercial-like test environment, Aterlo validated Preseem at 20 gigabits per second for select traffic types, doubling the original target and giving the company the evidence it needed to bring Preseem to market. 

In both cases, performance testing turned a technical unknown into a commercial advantage, giving each company the evidence it needed to move confidently into its next phase of growth. 

Infrastructure for Large-Scale Performance Testing 

Performance testing requires infrastructure capable of generating and handling the workloads being evaluated. 

The CENGN Datacentre provides secure network, compute, and storage infrastructure for performance testing projects. Each project receives a dedicated, secure slice of the Datacentre, with a customized application environment and network architecture configured around the specific validation requirements. All data is isolated and held within Canada. 

Depending on the testing requirements, infrastructure can include: 

• Bare-metal servers 

• Virtual machines 

• SSD storage 

• Intel Xeon CPUs 

• NVIDIA GPUs 

• Network configurations tailored to the project 

CENGN configures and manages the full environment, so Canadian startups and scaleups can run large-scale and extended testing without building the testing infrastructure themselves. 

Support Throughout the Testing Process 

The testing environment is paired with support for planning, implementation, execution, and analysis. 

CENGN Performance Testing Services include the following technical support: 

• Integration assistance for deploying the solution 

• Test planning 

• Test tool implementation 

• Test execution 

• Project management 

• Weekly progress check-ins 

• Continuous infrastructure monitoring 

• Detailed project results and actionable feedback 

Why Test with CENGN?

Performance testing is available from many sources, from cloud load-testing tools to in-house rigs. What sets CENGN apart is the level of customization built into every project, top to bottom of the engineering stack, and the expert support delivered alongside it. Rather than handing over a generic environment or a self-serve dashboard, CENGN builds a testing setup around your specific technology, deployment scenario, and performance questions, and works with your team through every stage of validation. 

• Customized from top to bottom of the stack. Each project gets a dedicated testing environment configured around your specific technology, deployment environment, and validation requirements. Most testing services do not customize at this level. 

• Expert-support through every stage. CENGN staff work alongside your team on environment setup, test planning, tool implementation, execution, and analysis, rather than handing over a dashboard and leaving you to it. 

• Funded validation, not infrastructure rental. These are funded projects that remove the cost barrier to testing at the scale that a real deployment demands. 

• Real infrastructure at scale. Access bare-metal servers and dedicated resources capable of generating and handling large workloads. 

• Data held in Canada. A secure environment with built-in data isolation and Canadian data residency. 

CENGN Performance Testing Services are currently available through Innovation projects that include over eight weeks of testing time on the CENGN Datacentre and up to $250,000 in funding. To be considered, companies must be based in Canada, have fewer than 500 employees, and have technology at TRL 4 or above. 

Validate Your Solution Before Deployment 

Performance testing can help companies understand how their technology solutions will perform when the conditions around them change. 

Whether the requirement is to handle more users, process higher data volumes, maintain response times, or operate under sustained workloads, CENGN Performance Testing Services provide the infrastructure and support to validate these conditions and produce evidence to support customer trials, procurement discussions, and deployment decisions. 

For eligible Canadian startups and scaleups, the current opportunity also provides project funding and extended testing time on the CENGN Datacentre. 

Validate Your Solution in Real-World Environments. Beyond performance testing, some solutions need to be proven in the operating conditions of the industry they will serve. The CENGN Living Lab Initiative provides Canadian startups and scaleups with real-world testing environments, sector-specific expertise, and non-dilutive funding to help them get market-ready. If that is the next step for your solution, a Living Lab Project can help you get there. 

About the Author

Zeyi believes good technology deserves good communication. She enjoys turning complex ideas into clear, engaging stories that help people understand not just how technology works, but why it matters. Her writing focuses on making innovation more accessible and connecting technical ideas with the people who can put them into practice. 

As Content & Digital Media Specialist at CENGN, Zeyi creates content that communicates the impact of advanced networking technologies across Canada’s innovation ecosystem. Through articles, digital campaigns, and digital media, she shares the stories of the people, partnerships, and technologies driving commercialization and helping Canadian innovation reach the real world. 

More by Zeyi Ohikere