I've noticed a few posts regarding stress testing IIS, but I'm more interested in knowing a good way to establish a bench mark of what my physical web server can handle.
I'm working on a production system right now that seems to be slowing to a near halt on a daily basis, and no one can seem to figure out what is causing the issue. This is your standard N-tier set up (client, web server, db server). I have created some simple ASP.NET pages that can do a few simple things that I'm using to establish a benchmark for stress testing that I can later user when comparing with the production system that is already in place.
I have already built a sample aspx page that simply returns back some web server statistics about the box utilizations, nothing heavy, maybe a few lines of code. I've also created a simple web service (asmx) that will test a DB connection given the correct id, again nothing heavy just opening a db connection and a sample query that doesn't really do anything.
What I would like to know is, what is a good stress level that the following tests should operate under? In particular, I'm using Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool, and I'm curious what most people would expect the Stress Level and the Stress Multiplier acceptable ranges should be. I already know at what point the web server starts buckling, its around 20 Stress Level and 10 Stress Multiplier give or take, which results in about ~275 page requests / sec. I'm trying to find out if that number is way too low, and if that's some sort of indication that there's an issue between the client and the web server or a hardware issue of some sort, or if it's more of an indication that there's nothing wrong and that the system is just too heavy.
UPDATE: Since I originally wrote this post the code has been moved to a server running Windows 2003 utilizing IIS 7.
What I'd like to know now is if I set up a relatively simple test, such as a basic index.html file that just serves up a small page, what would you expect the "best" page requests / sec I could achieve from a stress test?