Administering an ISP Installation

Performance Testing

In order to test a Web application’s maximum possible performance, you’ll need the following:

• An isolated private network
• Enough clients to saturate the server
• At least 100 megabits per second (Mbps) of network bandwidth
• Several network adapters to distribute the load
• A multiprocessor machine for scalability testing

First, test the pages with your browser in order to verify that the application is running correctly.

Note   You will need to rerun tests in order to verify that results are reproducible.

Because you don’t run an application in a vacuum, maximum performance is not always what you want to test. For example, you might also want to know how well your application performs under an average load, coexisting with other Web sites and other non­Web applications on the server. To test for average performance, set some goals for the application and see if it can meet them. For example:

• More than 20 pages/second
• Less than 50 percent capacity utilization of CPU
• Less than 10 seconds response time

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