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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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1. Test the simple devices, such as switches and routers, that don't maintain state tables by blasting traffic through them. Test various packet sizes.

2. Test the firewall. Perform throughput tests similar to Step #1. For session tests, use the techniques you would employ for testing Web servers. It's important to gauge sessions for stateful packet-filter firewalls, because they maintain a table of all active connections.

3. Test caching devices. Make sure you use varied content, including HTML, graphics and Java files, and not the same page again and again. Add a few cache misses, and don't forget that some dynamic pages can't be cached.

4. Test the Web servers and load balancers. Check the successful hits per second and download times. Turn on compression and see if more pages are served.

5. Test SSL encryption speeds, if necessary. Whether you're running SSL in software or off-loading it to an accelerator card, test the encrypted Web traffic. Even with off-loaded SSL, the server has more traffic floating around its PCI bus than it does without any encryption.

6. Test the disk-access systems. Pull site data from a mounted network drive and test disk performance where the log files are written.

7. Test any authentication servers, including LDAP directories. Most LDAP directories work independent of the Web servers.

8. If your site contains mail forms, test if your e-mail server can handle the traffic by spamming it.

9. Test the entire infrastructure. This will be the most time-consuming test to set up--you'll be simultaneously hitting the Web server, access databases and authentication systemsÃ‘and handling SSL.