Methodology of capacity planning for web system

Abstract

In an ideal world, performance would be engineered into software starting early in the development process. The reality, however, is that budget and schedule constraints often lead developers, particularly devotees of the “agile” methodologies, to adopt a “make it run, make it run right, make it run fast” strategy. The result is that, somewhere near the end of the project, performance problems appear. Nearly everyone runs into performance problems at one time or another. Today’s software development organizations are being asked to do more with less. In many cases, this means upgrading legacy applications to accommodate a new infrastructure (e.g., a Web front-end), improve response time or throughput, or both. This article presents a quantitative approach to performance planning that helps prevent problems, identify potential solutions, and prioritize efforts to achieve the greatest application performance with the least effort.