Another Book Update: Performance & Scalability Chapter shipped

Another book update, I shipped the Performance and Scalability chapter yesterday which I’ve hammered out in the last week. It’s come together well with three main sections: Laying the foundations, Monitoring and Common Symptoms.

Laying the foundations covers all of the things you must do before embarking on any form of performance testing, the right disk arrays, the right SQL settings, ThreadPool settings, the right number of hosts, etc. These are all things that are typically either forgotten or overlooked by customers but without them your performance will never be as good as it can be and often causes you to get nowhere near your performance targets.

Monitoring covers how you should approach performance testing and some useful tools and techniques, I also cover the performance counters you need to monitor across BizTalk, SQL and IIS during performance testing, covers what they mean, how you should analyse them and covers BizTalk Throttling in great detail.

Common symptoms as the name implies covers the things that commonly cause problems during performance testing, discusses why they happen and the steps you need to take to resolve them and improve performance.

All in all its fulfilled my aim to be a great reference to use during performance testing and to understand the mechanisms BizTalk will use to protect itself from overloading. I think (given my poor memory) that I’ll end up using it once the book is published! J

If any of you have had any problems during scalability testing I’d love to hear what they were to ensure the chapter covers all bases – contact me via the blog!

On to the next chapter, only a few to go now!