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Web Infrastructure: Relieve Web Performance Anxiety: Page 3 of 5

Most benchmarking tools can simulate low bandwidth. But if you want to inject latency or network problems like dropped packets somewhere beyond the end nodes, you'll need a specialty device such as the Shunra Software's Storm. Don't forget to stress-test your firewall, Internet router and any other device in between (see Step by Step).

Something Old, Something New

If you decide to upgrade your Web infrastructure or change the design altogether based on the results of your end-to-end benchmarking tests, beware of overbuilding your site. Say you have a Web server that usually gets about 1 million hits per month. One day your site gets a mention on nationwide television, and suddenly your traffic spikes to 1 million hits per hour for several hours. That doesn't justify restructuring your site to handle so much traffic: Buying more hardware and bandwidth than you really need is wasteful. You really can't plan for these extreme cases, so build only to your expected peak loads.

And before going live with your upgraded Web infrastructure, make sure you run the old and new Web sites simultaneously. It's best to launch the new site during your slowest periods, unannounced. This lets you iron out any lingering problems behind the scenes. Test the new site from somewhere else on the Internet, too, such as from a dial-up or DSL connection. Any upgrade, even one as minor as adding RAM, has the potential to break some piece of software, so test-drive your new Web site components thoroughly.

Michael J. DeMaria is an associate technology editor based at Network Computing's Syracuse University Real-World Labs®. Write to him at [email protected].

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.