2.4 Benchmarking
Benchmarking is the process used to take an application environment and determine the capacity of that environment through load testing. This allows one to make reasonable judgements as your environment begins to change. Using benchmarks, you can determine the current work environment capacity, and set expectations as new applications and components are introduced.
Benchmarking is primarily interesting to two kinds of clients:
- Clients who already have an application and want to migrate to a new version of WebSphere or want to evaluate the exact number of machines for their target deployment platform.
- Clients who sell products based on WebSphere and want to provide sizing estimations for their products.
Many sophisticated enterprises maintain a benchmark of their application stack and change it after each launch or upgrade of a component. These customers usually have well developed application testing environments, and teams dedicated to the cause. For those that do not, alternatives are available, such as the IBM eServer Benchmark Centers or the IBM Test Center. Please refer to IBM eServer™ Benchmarking Centers and IBM Test Center for more information about these options.
There are also third party benchmark companies that provide this service. When choosing, make sure that the team performing the benchmark tests has adequate knowledge of the environment, and a clear set of goals. This helps to reduce the costs of the benchmark tests, and creates results that are much easier to quantify.