Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Topics
Chapter 9: Capacity Planning 227
Topics allow the users to browse the portal site’s content by using a logical representation
of grouping. Browsing topics is an easier way for users to find information
and is also usually generates many hits on the server. It is important to test the
latency of the topic structure because users are likely to use topics to find information.
Users might find it unacceptable if the topic structure takes too long to load.
Team Sites
Windows SharePoint Services allows users to create team sites that are more project
or department specific than the corporate or departmental portal sites. These sites
can be used by teams to upload documents and collaborate and therefore will be
requested many times as well. Microsoft’s research shows that 40 percent of all farm
traffic will be to team sites.
Custom Pages and Web Parts
Adding custom Web Parts to pages is what makes SharePoint Portal Server a flexible
solution. These Web Parts can also have a huge impact on the overall performance
of the system. Custom Web Parts that are not properly developed or that connect to
external resources can dramatically slow down the performance of the system. For
example, if you normally serve 24 pages a second, each page is served in about 40
milliseconds. All Web Parts on that page are rendered in that time. Therefore, it is
important to test each of these Web Parts before importing them into a production
portal site. This procedure would allow the administrator to identify whether the
Web Part could be the bottleneck of the portal site.
Search
One of the most important features of a knowledge management solution is a powerful
search engine that not only allows the user to find accurate information
throughout the enterprise but also performs quickly. Therefore, the search performance
is also another scenario that has to be tested. Research shows that 25 percent
of the corporate portal site usage is for searches. If your organization plans to use
searches extensively, it is even more important to thoroughly stress test the search
function.
Mixed Scenario
A mixed scenario uses a combination of multiple scenarios to verify how the system
performs when multiple parts of the portal site are being used at the same time. The
mixed scenario represents actually the most realistic and therefore interesting scenario.
A mixed scenario is the most important one to test, but doing so requires
using customized ACT scripts.