I t seems odd, but one of the biggest risks you face with your Web-application development projects is the price of popularity. The mistakes of Victoria's Secret and other sites that buckled because they didn't plan for scalable success should be familiar warnings to us all. First is the brute force approach, where you ask the IT staff, or maybe your company's employees, to hammer away at a particular URL a week or so before you are ready to unveil it to the public at large. Your hope is that if you tell enough people and they hammer away diligently, you might expose some weakness or potential choke points. A variation is to use a test lab with hundreds of machines capable of creating thousands of simultaneous sessions, such as the KeyLabs facility in Utah, and let them do the stress testing under more scientifically controlled conditions.
Brute force is fine for simple things, but the biggest test lab can only do so much stress testing.
A second method is to use application modeling tools as a substitute. A good example of this kind of approach is with Ganymede Software's Chariot and Pegasus tools. You can record typical Web application scenarios and play them back through your network to determine if these applications will bog down anywhere. You need to make sure that you indeed tested the right thing and found the actual bottlenecks in your applications and not something inherently wrong with your network-or with your test configuration. A third approach involves using a third-party company to monitor your applications from afar, over the actual Internet and in real time.