Measuring Application Performance

The creators of the PT application tested it to obtain baseline figures that describe its performance and scalability. These numbers are a snapshot in that they establish only how well the application functions and do not suggest how to improve its performance or increase the number of users it can serve simultaneously.

Future installments of the BDG might include tests that attempt to isolate the functioning of individual components of this or another application, locate performance bottlenecks, and indicate how to change code, software configuration, or hardware configuration to increase performance or scalability. To read about ideas that could help in this task, see Using Performance Data.

This section describes two series of tests, one on a network consisting of a single BackOffice Server computer running on Windows NT 4.0 and the other consisting of a single BackOffice Server computer running on Windows 2000 Server. In each case, three client computers created the virtual workload. For more details on system configuration, see PT Test Architecture.