Administering an ISP Installation

Testing Applications with WCAT

WCAT, available on the Resource Kit companion CD, simulates various workloads on client-server configurations. Using WCAT, you can test how your IIS 5.0 and network configurations will respond to different client requests for content, data, or HTML pages. With the results of these tests, you can determine the optimal server and network configurations for your computer. For more information about WCAT, see Monitoring and Tuning Your Server in this book, and the WCAT documentation available on the Resource Kit companion CD.

Because Web servers are vulnerable to overload, it is crucial to virtually stress your Web server before rolling it out into a production environment. Since your server might be idle one minute, but then might suddenly receive 10,000 simultaneous requests, you should stress your application in order to see how it will react in an overloaded environment. When running stress on an application, increase the number of requests, starting at 100 and going as high as 100,000. You can then use System Monitor to see the effects that the stressed application is having on the server. Make any necessary changes to ensure the availability of your application.

The next section briefly tells you how to run a WCAT script, how the script can test a sample workload on your site, and how to interpret the results.

See the following: