How we did it

Tests were executed with Spirent's Avalanche 2500 (operating system Version 62112, product Version 6.51, two CPUs) and Avalanche Commander v6.51 Build 34500.

The server under test included Internet Information Server (IIS) on Windows Server 2003. All IIS logging was disabled to increase Web performance.

We ran three tests to focus on the three main subsystems of the server: CPU performance, network adapter and disk I/O. The CPU test consists of SSL transactions triggered by HTTPS requests for small files, about 1K byte in size. The goal was to load down the CPU down with SSL encryption key calculations. The small file request reduced the load on the disk I/O and network subsystems.

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Tests were executed with Spirent's Avalanche 2500 (operating system Version 62112, product Version 6.51, two CPUs) and Avalanche Commander v6.51 Build 34500.

The server under test included Internet Information Server (IIS) on Windows Server 2003. All IIS logging was disabled to increase Web performance.

We ran three tests to focus on the three main subsystems of the server: CPU performance, network adapter and disk I/O. The CPU test consists of SSL transactions triggered by HTTPS requests for small files, about 1K byte in size. The goal was to load down the CPU down with SSL encryption key calculations. The small file request reduced the load on the disk I/O and network subsystems.

The disk I/O subsystem test submitted random HTTP requests of small files in a large file space. The file space (dataset) size was ideally more than four times the amount of physical memory to minimize the effects of caching. The small file requests minimized the workload on the network subsystem. The HTTP requests minimized the load on the CPU subsystem.

The network subsystem test executed HTTP requests of 35M-byte files. The goal of this test is to fully utilize the available bandwidth of the server.

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