Planning for Capacity and Performance
It is difficult to predict how variables in site design, coding practices, user behavior, and site architecture will combine to affect site performance. Therefore, it is important to plan and test the capacity and performance of your site before "going live" in a production environment.
If you are migrating an existing site, you can analyze your existing data as a basis for planning the new site. If you are creating a site for the first time, use the sizing guidelines provided in the MicrosoftCommerce Server 2000 Resource Kit to set up a test site, which you can then load, test, and optimize before going live.
Performance planning and capacity planning go hand in hand; however, each addresses a different perspective. Performance planning addresses the technical aspects of the site, focusing on performance metrics, such as Active Server Pages (ASP) page throughput and ASP latency. Capacity planning addresses the business perspective, focusing on maximizing the number of users that the site can handle.
Of the two, performance planning is the more straightforward. It is relatively easy to measure the number of checkout transactions per second and make comparisons to other commerce sites.
Analyzing user capacity is a little more complex. Before you can predict the maximum user capacity, you first need to profile user behavior, and then use the user profile information in conjunction with your performance metrics to calculate capacity. User behavior varies from site to site, depending on the richness of the shopping experience (page design, site design, and response time), as well as the types of products being sold and the extent of the product line. One site may support 1,000 users, while another site installed on an identical platform may support only 200 users because of differences in user behavior.
For more information about performance analysis and capacity planning, see the white paper Sizing Guidelines for Windows 2000 Domain Controller and Global Catalog Server, available at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=6278.
The following table lists some of the questions that you need to answer in planning for performance.
| Planning question | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| What are the key items to measure to determine site performance? | Select the factors that closely match your goals for user experience. For example, if it is your goal to enable users to browse the catalog quickly, measure the speed at which a catalog browse request is returned. |
| What are the key usage profiles for measuring site performance? | Determine how you expect users to connect to your site and the expected load. Use this usage profile in your test environment, and then confirm that the profiles are correct when you have collected usage information in the Commerce Server Data Warehouse. |
| What tools and resources will you need to measure the performance of your site? | Review the performance tools provided in the Commerce Server 2000 Resource Kit to determine whether they meet your requirements. |
| How many servers do you require for your site? How should they be configured? | Start by reviewing the usage scenario configuration information provided in the Commerce Server 2000 Resource Kit. Compare these scenarios to your site requirements and modify the configurations to meet your needs. |
| What are your expectations about the rate at which your site usage will grow? | Include excess capacity in the early stages of your site deployment. Compare actual growth to projections at regular intervals. |
| How will you balance the load across the servers in your site installation? | See the MicrosoftWindows 2000 Resource Kit and the Commerce Server 2000 Resource Kit for information about using Network Load Balancing (NLB). |
See Also
Monitoring Commerce Server Sites
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