• 64-bit architecture   Only 64-bit servers were used in the test environment. Although Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be deployed on 32-bit servers, we recommend that you employ 64-bit servers in Office SharePoint Server 2007 farm deployments. For more information, see the 64-bit vs. 32-bit section in the article About performance and capacity planning (Office SharePoint Server).

• Disk-based caching is enabled   Disk-based caching eliminates the need to access the database multiple times for code fragments or large binary files, such as images, sounds, and videos. Enabling disk-based caching will improve performance across your entire deployment. By default, disk-based caching is not enabled. For information about how to enable disk-based caching, see Disk-based Caching for Binary Large Objects (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=82617&clcid=0x409).

In order to provide a high level of test-result detail, two farm configurations were used for testing, ranging from two to four Web servers together with a single index server and a single database server computer running Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database software. Testing was performed with twenty-seven client computers that simulated up to 270 concurrent user connections. All server computers were 64-bit, and the client computers were 32-bit.

The following table lists the specific hardware that was used for testing.

A gigabit (1 billion bits/sec) network was used in the test environment. We recommend that you use a gigabit network between servers in a Office SharePoint Server farm to ensure sufficient network bandwidth.

The following table shows the software that was installed on the servers used for this testing.

The following usage scenarios were used concurrently to test throughput of the test farm. Each test consisted of a specific mix of the three scenarios according to the table later in this section. Note that although random sites were used, these sites were limited to a limited set of sites to ensure a high number of cached page hits. Images on pages containing images were up to 15 kilobytes (KB) in size.

• Scenario 1 

  1. User navigates to the root site Welcome page.

  2. User navigates to a random site.

  3. User navigates to an article page that contains three images under the random site.

• Scenario 2 

  1. User navigates to a random site.

  2. User navigates to an article page that contains three images under the random site.

  3. User navigates to another random site.

  4. User navigates to an article page that contains three images under the random site, making sure that this page differs from the preceding page.

• Scenario 3 

  1. User navigates to the root site Welcome page.

  2. User performs a search query.

  3. User navigates to an article page that contains three images under a random site.

The following table shows the percentage of throughput consumed by each listed scenario in the test environment. Note that a negligible amount of throughput was used by background requests, but was not a performance consideration.

The following table shows the sizes of the database content, index, and caches during testing.

The following resources existed on the Welcome pages used for testing.

• 1 HTML field control

• 2 image field controls

• 1 TOC Web Part

• 1 Summary Link Web Part

The following table lists the output cache settings that were used during testing of anonymous user operations.

The following table lists the output cache settings that were used during testing of authenticated user operations.

The following table shows the object cache settings that were used during testing. These settings correspond to the settings on the Object cache settings page under Site Settings for an individual site in a site collection.

The following code string defines the BLOB cache settings that were used during testing. This code string is contained in the Web.config file for the Web application. If you copy this code for use in the Web.config file on your own server, replace <drive_letter> with the drive letter that corresponds to the hard disk drive on which you plan to store the BLOB cache on your server.

<BlobCache location="<drive_letter>:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" enabled="true" />

The following table lists the recommended hardware for Web servers, index servers and database servers. For more information about minimum and recommended system requirements for Office SharePoint Server 2007, see Determine hardware and software requirements (Office SharePoint Server). For more information about estimating disk space requirements for Internet environments, see Estimating disk space requirements later in this article.

You can estimate the performance of your starting-point topology by comparing your topology to the starting-point topologies that are provided in Plan for redundancy (Office SharePoint Server). Doing so can help you quickly determine whether you must scale your starting-point topology to meet your performance and capacity goals.

To increase the capacity and performance of one of the starting-point topologies, either scale up by implementing server computers that have greater capacity or scale out by adding additional servers to the topology. This section describes the general performance characteristics of several scaled-out topologies. The sample topologies represent the following common ways to scale a topology for an Internet portal environment:

• To accommodate greater user load, add Web server computers.

• To accommodate greater data load, add capacity to the database server role by increasing the capacity of a single (clustered or mirrored) server, by upgrading from a 32-bit server to a 64-bit server, or by adding clustered or mirrored servers.

• Maintain a ratio of no greater than eight Web server computers to one (clustered or mirrored) database server computer. While the maximum ratio of Web servers to database servers we tested for this document was 4x1 (four Web servers to one database server), deployment of more Web servers or more robust hardware might yield better results in your environment.

Throughput is the number of operations that a server farm can perform per second. Throughput is measured in requests per second (RPS). This section provides test data that shows farm throughput for an increasing number of front-end Web servers and user connections.

Several factors can affect throughput. These include the number of users, complexity and frequency of user operations, caching, and customization of pages and Web Parts. Each of these factors can have a major effect on farm throughput. You should carefully consider each of these factors when you plan your deployment.

Because Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be deployed and configured in a wide variety of ways, there is no simple way to estimate how many users can be supported by a given number of servers. Therefore, make sure that you conduct testing in your own environment before you deploy Office SharePoint Server 2007 in a production environment.

In general, you should enable object caching and BLOB caching in an Internet portal environment. In an environment that uses pure anonymous authentication, enabling caching can improve farm performance by a factor of two or more. For more information about caching in Office SharePoint Server 2007, see Custom Caching Overview (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=82618&clcid=0x409), and see the Caching section of Additional performance and capacity planning factors (Office SharePoint Server).

If your organization has an existing Internet portal solution, you can view the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) logs to determine the usage patterns and trends in your current environment. For more information about parsing IIS logs, see Analyzing Log Files (IIS 6.0) (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=78825&clcid=0x409).

If your organization is planning a new Internet portal solution, use the information in this section to estimate your usage patterns.

Test results

Pure anonymous environment

NTLM authenticated environment

80 percent anonymous, 20 percent NTLM authenticated environment

This section provides tables that can help you estimate disk space requirements for Internet portal environments. Disk space requirements for your hardware will vary greatly by server role and scenario, and are dependent upon data to be stored in the content database, caching requirements, and external content crawled by search. Where possible, numbers are filled into the formulas based on disk space requirements that can be predicted (for example, the size of installation files).

First, estimate your disk space requirements by server role. Then, based on your planned topology, for cases in which server roles share the same physical server computer, sum the disk space requirements for those roles. Finally, make sure that your hardware can accommodate your disk space requirements.

Additionally, best practices for SQL Server storage should be applied to database servers. For more information, see Physical Database Storage Design (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=78853&clcid=0x409).If more than one database server is implemented, apply the SQL disk space factor separately for each search server.

Database server disk space requirements

Index server disk space requirements

Web server disk space requirements

To help you determine when you must scale your system up or out, use performance counters to monitor the health of your system. Use the information in the following tables to determine what performance counters to monitor, and to which process the performance counters should be applied.

Web and index servers

Database server