Capacity Planning

Network Bandwidth

Once you determine how many customers/clients you want to serve during a given time period, you have the lower limit for your network connection bandwidth. You need to accommodate both normal load and usage spikes; you can average these to get a reasonable estimation of network capacity.

Of course, the type of site you operate has a large effect on this issue. For example, if you are largely or entirely subscriber-based, or if your site is only on an intranet or an intranet/extranet combination, you probably already have a good idea of the maximum spike size. If, on the other hand, you issue software revisions to an audience of unknown size on the Web, there may not be a good way to predict the size of resulting spikes. You might, in fact, have to measure one or more actual occurrences to decide whether your bandwidth is sufficient.