Software Testing Methodology Question:

When you begin your stress testing, you will want to increase your capacity testing to make sure you are able to handle the increased load of data such as ASP pages and graphics. When you test the ASP pages, you may want to create a page similar to the original page that will simulate the same items on the ASP page and have it send the information to a test bed with a process that completes just a small data output. By doing this, you will have your processor still stressing the system but not taking up the bandwidth by sending the HTML code along the full path. This will not stress the entire code but will give you a basis from which to work. Dividing the requests per second by the total number of user or threads will determine the number of transactions per second. It will tell you at what point the server will start becoming less efficient at handling the load. Let's look at an example. Let's say your test with 50 users shows your server can handle 5 requests per seconf, with 100 users it is 10 requests per second, with 200 users it is 15 requests per second, and eventually with 300 users it is 20 requests per second. Your requests per second are continually climbing, so it seems that you are obtaining steadily improving performance. Let's look at the ratios:

05/50 = 0.1
10/100 = 0.1
15/200 = 0.075
20/300 = 0.073

From this example you can see that the performance of the server is becoming less and less efficient as the load grows. This in itself is not necessarily bad (as long as your pages are still returning within your target time frame). However, it can be a useful indicator during your optimization process and does give you some indication of how much leeway you have to handle expected peaks.