Chapter 8. Performance Testing

Have you ever poured your heart and soul into an application, working weekends and missing family events to get every detail of the application correct? When the big day finally comes to bring the site live, your new application brings the server to its knees within the first hour of production. You could have had two cups of coffee with the time it took to load the page. You then have to work more weekends, missing more family events to pin down what exactly went wrong with your "prize-winning" application. This example may be a bit severe, but we've all created applications wherein the performance was less than desirable. This could have happened because of a memory leak, because you didn't test with an adequate size database, or because you didn't anticipate the popularity of the application.