Chapter Overviews

Following is a brief overview of each chapter. For those of you in a hurry to skip some chapters, we give you an idea of the concepts covered in each.

Chapter 1: Laying the Performance Analysis Ground Work

Chapter 1 details where performance testing resides in the software development life cycle and why performance testing is as important as functional testing of the application. It describes how the results from a performance test provide a more realistic application deployment scenario and a substantial cost savings for the project. Additionally, it provides a background of the performance testing methodology used in the book.

Chapter 2: Preparing and Planning for the Performance Test

Before executing the performance test, you must compile specific information regarding the application being tested . Chapter 2 provides an overview of the information the tester is expected to gather and the sources where they can find this data. Sources include marketing forecasts, production IIS logs, performance logs, and functional specifications for the application.

Chapter 3: Stress Testing with Microsoft Application Center Test (ACT)

Because the book discusses Web applications built solely using Microsoft software and technologies, the application stress tool discussed in the book is Microsoft Application Center Test (ACT). ACT is relatively new. Chapter 3 takes a detailed look at the tool, focusing on how to create test scripts using ACT and explaining the intricacies of scripting Web applications.

Chapter 4: Monitoring Application Performance with System Monitor

The primary tool that you’ll use when conducting Web application performance analysis is System Monitor. Chapter 4 introduces System Monitor and explains some of the most commonly used performance counters and how to use them when tracking down processor, disk, and memory bottlenecks.

Chapter 5: Application Network Analysis

Chapter 5 provides an overview network performance analysis, which is targeted at identifying pages or functions that are taking the most time to load within an application. ACE provides tips on identifying slow pages or functions by capturing all traffic within your application using Network Monitor and then analyzing the captured data to extrapolate end user response times, bytes transferred, and network round trips.

Chapter 6: Analyzing and Performance Tuning the Web Tier

Data collected at the IIS tier can reveal bottlenecks within the ASP.NET code, middle tier or SQL tier. The reader is instructed to interpret the IIS logs and performance monitor logs to find these bottlenecks. Recommendations are included in Chapter 6 on how to address bottlenecks at the IIS tier.

Chapter 7: Profiling Managed Code

It is essential to understand how to analyze and profile managed code to successfully performance test Microsoft .NET Web applications. Chapter 7 details features of the .NET Framework that directly effect performance of your .NET Web application. This chapter also provides an overview of key .NET performance counters and two useful applications that can be used when profiling managed code performance.

Chapter 8: Analyzing the SQL Tier

Bottlenecks at the SQL tier can reduce the performance of Web-based applications by thousands of percent. Bottlenecks at the back end can also be extremely difficult to pinpoint and correct. It takes a high level of SQL expertise to correctly diagnose and correct problems at the Microsoft SQL server level. Chapter 8 shows the reader some of the more basic methods to profile SQL server activity, detect the bottleneck, and then correct the problem by optimizing SQL Server code and modifying the database architecture.

Chapter 9: Estimating IIS Tier Capacity with Transaction Cost Analysis

Chapter 9 explains in depth Microsoft’s methodology for calculating the Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA) of a Web-based application. TCA numbers are used to measure a Web site’s capacity to host users; they can also be a means to measure performance improvements made to the application.

Chapter 10: Performance Modeling: Tools for Predicting Performance

One goal of performance modeling is to be truly proactive in performance engineering—to examine a proposed system in its entirety, from hardware and network resources to code optimization, before completely building any one component. In Chapter 10, ACE covers scenarios in which performance modeling can replace other methods of performance assessment and engineering, different methods of modeling and when they are appropriate for use, a brief look at currently available performance modeling tools and a detailed look at the toolkit approach, represented by Microsoft’s Indy project.

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