Rather than taking preventive measures -- like application benchmarking, and collecting statistical data for the performance key indicators -- one typically looks at application performance only when users start complaining. Progress technical support receives several calls per month and sometimes per week regarding performance. WebSpeed applications very, very rarely fail, if at all. You have a rock solid, stable WebSpeed environment with the potential of ultimate performance, but does it really deliver to the greatest of its capabilities? Are your application and database designed to take advantage of the maximum that WebSpeed has to offer?

Getting the maximum performance out of any given environment is a daunting task. It is difficult to assess the theoretical maximum possible performance due to the huge number of variables that can impact the result.

To identify some of these variables, we?ll examine the HTTP request roundtrip in a WebSpeed environment. This will help us to understand the inner workings of WebSpeed, so that we can identify possible performance bottlenecks to address either in application design or with appropriate tuning.