Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

8.6. Performance Testing and Tuning

The goal of performance testing and subsequently tuning is to ensure that you get the most "bang for your buck" out of your hardware. Investing in a relatively small amount of performance testing and tuning can pay dividends. Many times, a few tips and tricks can be applied to significantly improve performance and therefore reduce the size of the hardware real estate required to run the solution. For mission-critical deployments that have the equivalent production hardware in the disaster recovery site, these savings can be significant. In addition, this does also translate to operations savings, because you'll need to manage and support fewer servers in production. Performance gains from 30 to 200 percent are not uncommon when tuning BizTalk solutions. Gains such as these translate into significant savings.

8.6.1. Load Profile

When measuring the performance of a given solution, ensure that the load profile is representative of what will be seen in production. For example, suppose you have five endpoints, each bound to a different orchestration. One of those endpoints might handle 80 percent of the messages, and the orchestration bound to that endpoint is expensive in terms of performance. If the solution were to be tested by distributing an even load over all endpoints, the performance of the solution would appear much better than would be seen in a production environment, and any issues related to performance would not be flagged until the ...