Managing Performance
Managing the performance of your Commerce Server 2000 site largely consists of finding and removing bottlenecks. A bottleneck is hardware or software that is operating at maximum capacity. As the load approaches maximum capacity, the bottleneck begins to restrict the flow of work through the system.**Performance tools can help you determine what hardware or software has reached a bottleneck. You can then improve the hardware, change configuration, or tune the software to improve overall performance.
Performance is only one factor in optimizing your Commerce Server site. Other important factors include ease of development and maintenance, time to market, availability of good programming tools, and in-house site developer expertise. Optimizing for performance can affect any of these other factors.
Web development is driven by a business case that determines priorities. For example, project goals might specify a particular programming language or data-access technology, and such decisions always affect performance to some degree. It is extremely important to determine a necessary level of performance appropriate to your Web site, then develop the site and manage it to that level of performance.
Web sites often run on multiple physical tiers, each of which has its own hardware, system software, and application software. As a result, Web applications can have many types of performance problems: hardware (client computer, Web server, database server, the network), system software (operating systems, networking software, system services), client applications, browsers, logical database, physical database, data access, and so on.
You can use the following questions to help determine your performance tuning goals:
Will the performance of this site meet our goals today and in the future?
Can we expect our current configuration to become a bottleneck?
How many users can our site support?
Monitoring performance regularly is the only way to be sure that the site is meeting specified performance goals. Regular performance monitoring can provide an early warning when a change degrades performance. You can collect performance data using existing system tools, having the site monitor report on its own performance, or by building special client applications to drive the system.
When you tune performance, you should measure system performance first to see if it meets your goals. If performance doesn’t meet your goals, find the bottleneck, remove it, and then repeat the process until you reach your performance goal. You can always increase performance further, but when site performance meets your goals, additional tuning is generally not cost-effective.
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