Merchant Benchmark Testing (Applet Integration)
Brinkman Financial Company (BFC) has written a quick Benchmark script to test a merchant’s computer to see how it would react when running the BFC Applet to integrate an EMV reader with the device. Download the PowerShell Script (right-click and select “Save link as” and place it into your Downloads directory). Navigate to the file then right-click on it and select “Run with PowerShell.” The computer will then ask if it is OK to run this script, select “Y” to allow this and other PowerShell scripts to run.
The Benchmark script is testing the following:
- Test DNS (name resolution) to BFC’s servers – does your local DNS server resolve as quickly and with the same value as the Google DNS servers and are they the same value?
- Network Speed tests – is the Internet connectivity OK by using a PING test to BFC’s servers and then by downloading a 21.6 MB file from BFC’s server. Please note, this is not measuring your bandwidth, it is only measuring at a known-good value. The download should run between 13-14 MBit/sec but anything above 5 Megabits per sec should be OK (the system has to download about 1 Megabit of data on each transaction).
- Computer Hardware checks
- CPU Speed and number of Logical Processors (cores or threads). The system is looking for better than 2 GHz and 4 cores or better.
- CPU Utilization: looking for less than 50% CPU utilization for a 20-second interval to see if the computer is overwhelmed.
- Hard Drive type and speed: Looking for a flash-memory drive and/or 100,000 MegaBytes per second transfer rate (determined by Microsoft Windows Performance monitoring tool).
- System Memory speed: the speed of the memory can affect how fast pages load and the system is ready for a transaction. We are looking for a memory speed of 1600 MHz or better.
- USB counts: how many USB hubs to how many plugged-in devices – we are hoping to verify that there is an open port on the computer. While USB 3.0 ports are good, the current EMV hardware is not utilizing that transfer speed.
The output will look similar to:
In the above example, the benchmark has noticed the number of CPU Logical processors is only 2. While this does not mean the software cannot run, it does suggest the computer may run slower than 7 seconds for starting the transaction. Same with the memory and hard drive details.
In this example, the computer has returned green for each test and should be able to load the EMV hardware and software combo and start a transaction in about 3-5 seconds after the card type is selected from within Postalmate.
Example of “Red” lines:
