Speed factors

[turfbult]

Hello,

I have designed a website using ASP ,Sql server ,a very little bit of java etc.

This website has not gone "live" yet ie. the public cannot access it. I am having major worries about how fast/slow it will be once 100's or 1000's of users access it. With just me accesing it, it is VERY quick!!

Things I did to increase the speed was indexing, stored procedures, doing all ASP BEFORE reaching the HTML tag and then all the obvious things like keeping jpeg's as small as possible etc. etc.

My questions are -
what factors determine the speed of your site / what can I do to make sure that my site will be fast??

We are thinking of moving to a dedicated server - will this make a MAJOR difference??

Does anyone know of tools to "stress-test" a website. I downloaded wcat.exe from Microsoft, but I cannot get it to work?? Is there anything else out there!?

I'm sure there are MANY people who have the same questions/fears!!

Any suggestions please.
Thanks,
T

[Clunietp]

Hey Turf

Sounds like you've done the basics and IIS is more scalable than we might think. A cool tool that I've been using recently is the MS Web Application Stress Tool. It's somewhat complicated to get configured correctly but it's helped me determine the most scalable way on how to design my websites. Get it here http://webtool.rte.microsoft.com/

A dedicated server won't hurt either, but it depends on the other services that your current server provides and the load that you have on it already.

Excellent article on enhancing ASP performance, definitely check it out
http://www.asptoday.com/articles/20000113.htm

Since I design web apps for a corporate intranet, I am blessed with knowing what kind of web browsers I will have at my sites, so I can optimize further by using style sheets and moving as much validation as I can to client side javascripts.


Hope this helps

[turfbult]

Hey Tom,

Thanks. It does help. I've tried using this stress tool, but as you say - terrible to configure.

I'll check out that ASP article.

Cheers,
T