These test results show the benefits of optimizing an
e-commerce site with Active Page Generator.
We optimized the Volcano Coffee Turbo (VCTurbo) site, a Microsoft
Commerce Server based example site. As
with most sites, many pages were optimizeable, and some were not.
The Volcano Coffee site is a good example of
a bare-bones e-commerce site. Most real
world sites will have a richer UI and more features, and will generally see
even greater relative performance gains from APGen optimization. For individual page tests, we used Microsoft Web
Application Stress Tool to load individual pages with no think time.
For the site results, we used Microsoft InetMonitor
to simulate different user loads.
Simulated users had think times of 30-70 seconds, or 40-80 seconds,
depending on the page. 2% of simulated
users performed a checkout.
VCTurbo is our baseline site. It is a well-written ASP site, including
design and coding improvements over the original Volcano Coffee (VC30)
site. VCTurbo performs over twice as well
as VC30. VCRocket is the next step up
from VCTurbo. It uses output caching in
ASP for the listing and product pages.
The rest of the site is the same as VCTurbo.
VCWarp is the next step up from VCRocket. It uses ISAPI extensions
written in C++ and
output caching to obtain excellent performance on the listing and product
pages. The rest of the site is the same
as VCTurbo. Unfortunately VCWarp crashed repeatedly and consistently due
to the ISAPI extensions not being threadsafe, so we were unable to obtain site performance
data for VCWarp. This underscores the difficulty of writing and maintaining
ISAPI extensions.
VCAPGen is the first APGen-optimized version of
VCTurbo. Most pages were optimized
using APGen and 2-phase content generation. The product page was optimized
using APGen and page fragment caching.
The database was optimized using smarter indexes and stored procedures. VCAPGenUltra is a step up from VCAPGen. As many pages as possible
were converted to
static pages using APGen. The same
database optimizations made to VCAPGen were made to VCAPGenUltra.
Tests were performed on Windows 2000 with a 4 proc x
550 MHz PIII Compaq Proliant Web Server with 1 GB of RAM, a 4 proc x 400 MHz
PIII Compaq Proliant SQL Server with 1 GB of RAM, and 4 test clients.
Full details on the optimizations and the results
will be available in a white paper by October 22. In addition, the optimized sites will be
available for download. | 
