9.1.1 Benchmarking benefits
Benchmarking plays an important role in evaluating a Web application. It provides valuable information, explicitly or implicitly, for a Web-based business both before and throughout its operation.
| A benchmark provides a quantitative expression of business requirements. |
Before building a Web application, any business organization will have certain types of requirements, such as the cost and profit associated with building and maintaining the application, acceptable time for a page to be returned to the user, the number of users the system can handle concurrently, and so on. These requirements are both relative and interdependent. A benchmark can provide a clear cross-product view of the requirements by means of numbers, tables, and figures.
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| A benchmark reliably predicts the performance of a production system under stress and after long-term operation. |
A typical Web application can be accessed by end-users without limits on location, time, or duration. As a result, it is bound to experience periods of peak demand and operate under stress. A typical Web application may also go several years without major upgrades. How will the system behave under stress, and what would be the best possible time for a system upgrade? Measuring the difference in resource usage between the current state of the system and the benchmark can help answer these questions.
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| A benchmark may help identify performance issues. |
Any Web application will undergo some changes, such as patches, layout modifications, or functional enhancements in its lifetime. All such changes are possible candidates for performance degradation. Before finalizing a change to the production site, it is highly beneficial to run a suite of tests to identify potential performance issues. A benchmark can serve as an excellent reference point for those tests.