title: What is a good benchmark test for load testing a production system running IIS?
body: <p>I've noticed a few <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7492/how-do-you-stress-test-a-web-application">posts</a> 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.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>What I would like to know is, <strong><em>what is a good stress level that the following tests should operate under</em></strong>?  In particular, I'm using <strong>Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool</strong>, and I'm curious what most people would expect the <strong>Stress Level</strong> and the <strong>Stress Multiplier</strong> <strong>acceptable</strong> 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.</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> Since I originally wrote this post the code has been moved to a server running Windows 2003 utilizing IIS 7.</p>
  
  <p>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?</p>