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W O R K S H O P

Web Infrastructure: Relieve Web Performance Anxiety

November 15, 2002
By Mike DeMaria

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If peak usage on your Web site is starting to look like a rush-hour traffic jam, it's time for a tune-up. A Web infrastructure without the necessary bandwidth, power, speed or efficiency to handle heavy loads will send frustrated users packing.

To get to the root of the problem, you need to test your site's end-to-end performance. Then you can determine whether your Web site is jammed because the Web server doesn't have enough processing power, your router is too slow or there's some other bottleneck.

Mapping it out

Before you begin benchmarking, decide what information you want to glean from your performance tests. You don't need to find out if your Web site can handle 45 Mbps--a single user could theoretically pull 45 Mbps. Instead, consider situations that are more difficult to test: Can your site handle 10,000 simultaneous users? How long will a user have to wait to download a page when 5,000 people are making database queries?

A useful test for measuring end-to-end performance is called functionality verification. It confirms whether the Web page that was downloaded is the real thing or an error page, so you can detect when your Web server can't reach the database server. Knowing your server can handle 1 million connections is fine, but if 40 percent of those connections contain SQL error messages, you have a problem.

Use as much realistic traffic as possible in your Web site testing. Download a typical page or execute multiple database inserts and queries. Merely initiating a TCP "open" and "close" isn't enough, unless you're conducting a Layer 4 firewall test, for instance, where content doesn't matter much. But if you're testing a Layer 7-aware device, you need real data.

Simulate user behavior, too, to ensure the test is realistic. Walk through the site, performing multiple tasks and factor in some "think time." It takes longer than one second for a user to download a complex Web form, fill it out and submit it, so add a few seconds or a minute before submitting a form to ensure it's an accurate representation.

Choosing the right benchmarking tools for your tests can be challenging. They vary in functionality (see the table, below, for some examples) and price. In some cases, you'll need to buy both benchmarking hardware and software. You can also try shareware, freeware and cheapware benchmarking tools, but they may lack necessary features.