Stacy Joines

A good stress test uncovers any problem areas before deploying the web site to production. The time and expense of performance tests pays off in the gains realized in customer satisfaction and overall site reliability. So far, we've discussed building good performance tests for your web site. Now let's cover building a realistic environment in which to run these tests. In short, you cannot go cheap in building your test environment. Poor infrastructure impacts performance and stress tests more than any other type of tests you'll run against your web site. Don't expect to meet your web site performance goals if you build the test environment with cheap cable, underpowered client machines, and low-bandwidth networks. To get the most out of your performance test efforts, the test environment must mimic the production environment as closely as possible, given the ever-pr... (more)