Effects of Current and Emerging Architecture Technologies

Effects of Current and Emerging Architecture Technologies

While the focus of this book will be on performance testing applications built with the Microsoft .NET Framework, the methodology presented also offers a backward compatible approach for Windows Distributed interNet applications Architecture (DNA). Given that .NET will still be relatively early in the market adoption cycle by the time this book goes to print, many Microsoft customers will still be running traditional ASP-based Web applications. Therefore, we present the performance analysis methodology that can be effectively utilized by Microsoft customers running both .NET Web services as well as Windows DNA Web applications. Where appropriate, we have included specific how to methodology for Windows DNA applications. The methodology laid out in this book focuses on identifying performance metrics that are business critical, such as response times, throughput, and scalability. As illustrated below, setting performance goals in the planning phase drives critical performance testing breakpoints.

Real World Example Site Performance Goals

For Microsoft s e-commerce Internet sites, we define maximum throughput for given user scenarios such as browsing products, adding products to a shopping basket, and checking out. We test the throughput for these scenarios both separately and while running in what is called a mixed test. The former defines the maximum scalability for each scenario individually with nothing else running on the servers. The latter (a mixed test) more closely simulates what actually occurs on the live site with various percentages of activity associated with a number of transaction types. Defining the maximum throughput of Microsoft s e-commerce sites directly depends on what the minimum performance goals are. For example, all pages must load within 10 seconds, average CPU utilization on servers must be less than 70 percent, and available memory must remain stable throughout the period of the test, all while the site is maintaining 10 customer checkouts per second. When page response times degrade to 11 seconds at higher throughput rates, the site is considered to be performing unacceptably. At this point, it is time to figure out what is causing and contributing to the unacceptable response time. In this manner, performance goals set in the planning phase drive break points during the performance-testing phase.

When performance planning is completed, our methodology focus shifts to utilizing software load simulation tools for pushing Web applications to their performance breakpoints. The goal during the testing phase is to define the real-world performance limits for the Web application. Finally, the focus shifts to the methods of drilling down into each application layer through effective analysis techniques with the goal of identifying the bottlenecks and formulating performance-enhancing solutions.



Performance Testing Microsoft  .NET Web Applications
Performance Testing Microsoft .NET Web Applications
ISBN: 596157134
EAN: N/A
Year: 2002
Pages: 67

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