Optimal Throughput with Acceptable Performance

All successful portal deployments share one attribute—the users do not complain about the server being slow. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it is important to consider this requirement and understand in more detail what acceptable performance really means before discussing the details of the performance characteristics of SharePoint Portal Server.

User operations fall into four general categories when measuring performance and throughput:

• Common operations. Common operations include viewing the home page on the dashboard site, browsing folders, browsing categories, retrieving documents, and simple search.
• Rare operations. Rare operations include creating document profiles, creating categories, and creating content sources.
• Long-running operations. Long-running operations include moving, copying, or deleting folders; deleting or renaming categories; and changing inherited security.
• Uncommon operations. Uncommon operations include all other operations such as check-in, check-out, publish, and approve.

Defining Acceptable Performance

Performance recommendations are for configurations that pass the following stringent set of user latency criteria:

• All common operations must have a mean latency less than three seconds.
• All uncommon or rare operations must have a mean latency less than five seconds.
• No single operation (excluding potentially long-running operations) can have a latency exceeding 10 seconds.

To determine the latency criteria, all latency measurements were performed multiple times in a variety of load, corpus, and network configurations. The latency criteria provided ensure that, for a typical deployment, users experience excellent performance.

Measuring Optimal Throughput

Recommendations for maximum throughput are the result of an extensive series of laboratory tests and real-world deployment experience. The laboratory tests generated a simulated user activity load against the server and measured a broad set of latencies under varying load rates. Reported maximum throughput rates satisfy the acceptable performance criteria outlined previously.

Profiling User Activity

A broad series of tests show that the exact mix of user operations (such as viewing the home page of the dashboard site, retrieving documents, checking in documents, etc.) does not have a significant impact on the maximum throughput recommendations. Although certain operations are more costly for the server to perform, throughput recommendations use a user activity mix that is representative of the majority of portal deployments. The user activity profile for all laboratory tests was:

• 95 percent for common operations (evenly distributed among the constituents).
• 5 percent for uncommon operations (evenly distributed among the constituents).
• Random occasional testing of all long-running and rare operations.