Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

226 Part III: Planning and Deployment
that might be of interest to you during the load simulation. You can monitor
counters on remote servers, but this is not recommended during stress testing, as the
resources required to send the performance data to the monitoring client might
affect the test results. For more information on performance monitoring and exactly
what to monitor with respect to SharePoint Portal Server, please refer to Chapter 10.
Scenarios for Load Stress Testing
One of the most important tasks before performing any stress tests is to understand
what the different scenarios can be. These scenarios could be written down and
then ordered by weight. It makes sense to test these scenarios, as they represent
most common tasks the users will perform and therefore should result in the fastest
response time possible. There are some tasks for which users simply expect a fast
response time, while there are others where they can accept slower response
times—for example, administrative tasks.
Performance scripts can be created to mimic anticipated load on the portal site.
The scenarios that follow represent the most commonly occurring scenarios, but if
your scenario differs, feel free to adjust according to your customized usage profile.
The Portal Home
SharePoint Portal Server allows you to create several portal sites. These are basically
the main places for information in an enterprise implementation and will be one of
the most requested locations in the intranet. It is important that at least the Home
page opens up in a very fast manner. Normally, the corporate portal site will receive
20 percent of the total farm traffic, and the Home page of the corporate portal site
will receive a significant amount of that traffic.
My Site
Personalization was one of the biggest demands of the users of the previous version
of SharePoint Portal Server. In SharePoint Portal Server 2003, every user can go to
his personal site by clicking My Site in the upper right corner. There is a personal
and shared view for each user. The user can decide between the shared and personal
view of the site and do some modifications. As most of the time people will
access mainly their own sites, we will focus on the Personal View page and not on
the Shared View.
The Shared View should be tested if you plan on using the corporate portal site
as a corporate directory. Because the Shared View of the My Site, combined with
user profiles, provides a very nice corporate directory, some organizations will make
use of this feature. In this instance, you should make public My Site views a low
percentage of testing because the public.aspx is one of the most expensive pages to
render. If you do not plan on using Shared Views as a corporate directory, it is not
necessary to include the Shared Views in your stress-testing plans.