Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 9: Capacity Planning 225
to create user names that have an integer at the end that increments by 1 and use the
same password for all of them. That way, you can have the ACT tool generate the
users for you.
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Figure 9-7 Users in ACT
Tools Used When Performing Load Simulations
There are a couple of tools that can help you understand the behavior and performance
of your portal site. One of them is Network Load Balancing Manager, and the
other one is the performance counter.
Network Load Balancing Manager
If you have any form of load-balanced server farm (medium or large farm), you
should use Network Load Balancing (NLB) Manager during stress testing. NLB Manager
allows you to create, configure, and manage all hosts of a Network Load Balancing
cluster from a single computer. You can then use NLB manager to bring down
nodes in the cluster to see the effect on performance. For more information on
using NLB Manager, please see the Network Load Balancing section of Chapter 11.
Performance Monitor
Microsoft ships the performance monitor together with the operating system. It is
extremely important to monitor the performance of CPU, Memory Usage, and Network
Utilization on each of the servers running SharePoint Portal Server during
stress testing. It is also imperative that you monitor SQL Server performance
counters on the SQL Server component during testing. Before you start your performance
measuring, you will have to select from a huge list of performance counters