A few recent, spectacular Web site failures have shown the value of testing performance and scalability of Internet applications before going online on the World Wide Web. These failures involved sites that hundreds of thousands or even millions of users could be expected to visit. On a different scale, but for the same reason, applications running on intranet sites that might expect no more than a few hundred users must be similarly tested.
Although the LitWare programmers created the PT application to be used only on an organization's intranet site, they realized that the large size of Main Street Hardware could let hundreds of users access the application simultaneously. Much smaller numbers are expected at first because only the Admin side of the PT application is being distributed in the initial deployment, which means that only about 25 learning administrators might use the application at one time. Still, this provides a good opportunity to test the performance of the technologies used in of the broader (User) application before it is deployed.