Selecting an appropriate server platform is an extremely important component of a successful portal deployment. The key hardware requirements are the CPU speed, amount of RAM, and hard disk space:
An important step in determining your server hardware requirements is establishing clear performance and scalability requirements. Unfortunately, it is frequently difficult to establish clear and detailed performance and scalability requirements for portal deployments. Most organizations find it difficult to predict the level or type of use that the site receives. To complicate matters, this level of use frequently changes and grows over time.
Most organizations can estimate accurately the following important deployment metrics:
You can use the quantitative descriptions of a portal deployment to estimate the required peak throughput. The following formula yields the peak throughput in operations per second.
Peak Throughput Formula
Number of users | X | percent of active users per day | X | number of operations per active user per day | X | peak factor |
360,000 | X | number of hours per day |
The number 360,000 is determined by:
100 (for percent conversion) X 60 (number of minutes in an hour) X 60 (number of seconds in a minute)
SharePoint Portal Server uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for all communication between the client and the server. The HTTP protocol is a connectionless protocol. Therefore, it is not possible to identify the number of concurrent users. The most important measurement of server throughput is the operations per second. The following examples illustrate applying the formula to a sample deployment for three sites.
The following is an example of how you can use the preceding formula to determine the requirements for a product group portal for 200 people. The product group contributes more than 90 percent of the site traffic. Although there might be thousands of other users who occasionally use the site, the number is insignificant compared to the product group usage.
For such a deployment, the following characteristics are reasonable.
Small Group Site Deployment | |
---|---|
Number of users | 200 |
Percent of active users per day | 90 |
Number of operations per active user per day | 10 |
Number of hours per day | 12 |
Peak factor | 5 |
These estimates yield a predicted peak throughput of 0.21 operations per second.
Predicted Peak Throughput
200 | X | 90 | X | 10 | X | 5 | = | 0.208 |
360,000 | X | 12 |
You could successfully deploy such a site with a server such as a 500 megahertz (MHz) Pentium III with 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM.
Another common deployment scenario is a divisional or enterprise portal for approximately 2,000 users. Such a site usually differs from the small group site as follows:
In this scenario, there is usually a broad mix of user needs. The average user is typically a less-focused user who might access the site to find a document or to read the morning news or announcements.
The following characteristics for such a site are typical.
Large General Site Deployment | |
---|---|
Number of users | 2,000 |
Percent of active users per day | 90 |
Number of operations per active user per day | 5 |
Number of hours per day | 12 |
Peak factor | 5 |
These estimates yield a predicted peak throughput of 1.0 operations per second. Such a site would probably require a server such as a quad processor 500 MHz Pentium III with 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM.
One final deployment example is the corporate search portal. In this scenario:
The following are common characteristics for such a deployment.
Large Search Site Deployment | |
---|---|
Number of users | 10,000 |
Percent of active users per day | 50 |
Number of operations per active user per day | 5 |
Number of hours per day | 16 |
Peak factor | 3 |
These estimates yield a predicted peak throughput of 1.3 operations per second. Such a site would probably require a server such as a quad processor 700 MHz Pentium III with 2 GB of RAM.
A large search site that includes more than 100,000 documents in the index benefits from using a server dedicated to crawling content to improve performance for users of the server dedicated to searching.
The following table presents a summary of the operations per second and the recommended hardware requirements for the three configurations discussed previously.
Deployment Configuration Comparison
| Small Group Site | Large General Site | Large Search Site |
---|---|---|---|
Number of users | 200 | 2,000 | 10,000 |
Percent of active users per day | 90 | 90 | 50 |
Number of operations per active user per day | 10 | 5 | 5 |
Number of hours per day | 12 | 12 | 16 |
Peak factor | 5 | 5 | 3 |
Operations per second | .21 | 1.0 | 1.3 |
Recommended processor | 500 MHz | Quad processor | Quad processor |
Recommended RAM | 512 MB | 1 GB | 2 GB |