Ektron Developer's Guide: Building an Ektron Powered Website

Appendix C. Performance Checklist

Chapters 14 and 15 briefly discussed some of the things to keep an eye on when deploying and maintaining your website. Some of the items covered included performance monitoring, and tracking availability and uptime. This appendix provides a checklist of items that should be addressed and kept in mind while developing and maintaining your website to maximize performance.

The items in the checklist require involvement from many roles in your organization, ranging from the developer to the hardware experts and administrators. By addressing these issues, you will be able to provide a highly available and efficient site that is able to serve your expanding business needs.

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

As mentioned in Chapter 1, the minimum recommended hardware requirements to run the Ektron Framework are a Core 2 processor or greater with 4GB of RAM, and a RAID Array for storage. The requirements will scale with your usage metrics, however. The benchmark for your running website requires that the server load should nominally be less than 75% CPU usage, with spikes remaining below 85% utilization. Your memory usage should be below 50% of the system memory. The reasoning behind keeping the usage well below maximum capacity is that if the load increases enough to overwhelm the server, requests will begin timing out and returning errors, and the server may not get a chance to catch up to the request cycle. This downward spiral can bring a server to its knees, so it's ...