After all, for most Web sites, the user experience is what matters most. No matter which vendor's technology is being used, proper application design and coding practices can make or break an application's scalability and performance levels. Furthering the goal to help developers use proper application design and coding practices, the results of the multiple-tier application Performance Benchmark project also contain a wealth of information about the application design, coding practices and performance tuning for Visual Studio and other Microsoft products for building Web applications. This implementation was then put through a set of exhaustive scalability and fault-tolerance tests on a variety of hardware configurations by NSTL, an independent testing facility. FMStocks is a Web-based application that lets registered customers set up portfolios and query financial data on publicly traded stocks on the NYSE and Nasdaq.
Customers can buy and sell stocks, and manage their portfolios online.
In the spirit of the open nature of the Web community, inclusive information and data about this test is being published on the Web so that any other software vendor, corporate customer or testing agency can replicate the tests in its own environment. The project focused on providing metrics that provide real value to corporate technology managers and enterprise developers so they can map the results of these tests to the real-world demands placed on their corporate Web sites in terms of performance, ability to handle large numbers of concurrent users, and fault tolerance. The results of this benchmark cannot be directly applied to every Visual Studio-based Web application. This benchmark was specifically designed to measure the raw processing power of the middle-tier application logic. For example, the application had a very thin client, with very little graphic or content-rich data presented on each page.