Bill Barker wrote:
>
> I agree with Remy
> that any single benchmark suite isn't going to tell you how your particular
> web-app will perform.
>
Bill,
Actually, I agree, but this isn't what that is :-)
There's a difference between:
a) Benchmarks for users that compare the performance of
servers against one another to help with buying
decisions. These are hard to write, hard to interpret,
and generally not very useful in predicting the
performance of a particular user's web apps.
b) Benchmarks for developers that help answer the
(suprisingly difficult) question "did my so called
performance enhancement help or hurt?" and "have
we met our performance goals". They also help set
up a framework for talking about performance. For
example, using the Apache ab utility is a quick and
easy way to get a very skewed performance estimate.
If there's something written down, everyone has
some clue that there's a skew, and some idea about
what the skew is.
(b) is a much easier than than (a), because the point
is to nail down the vocabulary and set up a common framework
for measuring progress, not to develop some ultimate
web-app performance benchmark for users. It's a purely
internal thing.
This isn't something I just made up :-) It's sort of
software engineering conventional wisdom that internal
benchmarks are necessary if you're going to make performance
a development goal, and I've used them to good effect on
several commercial projects.
--
Christopher St. John [EMAIL PROTECTED]
DistribuTopia http://www.distributopia.com
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