Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers

Performance Testing with the Web Application Center Test

All this talk about scalability is good in theory, and it's not hard to find hardware and software that produce impressive benchmarks. Theories and benchmarks don't guarantee adequate performance of your portal. You have to prove it yourself by either putting the system into production and hoping for the best or testing. For most of us, life is too short not to perform performance testing.

You can test the performance of your portal by standing it up in a test environment and unleashing a large number of users, or simulated users, to monitor how it responds to a load. You need dozens or hundreds of human users to get your portal to break a sweat. This type of testing is expensive and difficult ...