Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

220 Part III: Planning and Deployment
Adding Capacity
single active quad-CPU computer running SQL Server, providing a total capacity of
about 375 operations per second.
The observed network traffic rate between the front-end Web servers and the
emulated client systems was approximately 5600 KB per second. The search service
on the two dedicated search servers was supporting approximately eight search
operations per second total (per the workload definition), consuming only about 4.5
percent CPU on each of the search servers. User-perceived performance was similar
to that of the medium server farm, with typically sub-second performance for the
simple functions (access Home page, browse, read news, and so on). Search operations
responded in 1.5 to 2.0 seconds, depending on the query complexity, number
of indexes, references, and so on. Document management operations (such as
check-out/-in) completed within 2.0 to 2.5 seconds. Opening documents took no
longer than 3 to 5 seconds on average, depending on the file type (Microsoft Office
Word, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, and so on) and file
size—larger files obviously requiring more time to transfer to the client desktop
computers.
Monitoring servers frequently to determine when additional capacity is needed is an
important factor in capacity planning. Information on how to monitor servers is not
included in this chapter. You should refer to Chapter 10,“Performance Monitoring in
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003,” for detailed information on monitoring
servers. For single servers and small farms, the only way to increase capacity is
to move to the next farm level up when CPU and memory have hit their limits. To
add capacity to a medium or large server farm, see Chapter 11.
Performance Considerations
Although much effort has been spent by Microsoft and its partners to design and use
a workload that is representative of typical user type mixes and portal site functions
use, the results obtained are clearly related to that workload definition and the portal
site’s corpus content. Everyone should test their servers for capacity before going
live, but doing so is highly recommended and almost imperative if your workload
differs significantly from the workload used during testing for this chapter.
The following is a summary of key performance results from the testing done
for this chapter:
■ A single server with MSDE cannot handle more than five operations per second
because of the five-job limit MSDE imposes. In this scenario, MSDE is the limiting
factor.