I can think of just two situations in life that never fail to have me reaching for a sick bag, every time.

The first case, is when I’m expecting to be served up an oversized portion of delicious sautéed potato, when I discover (all too late) that what I’ve actually been given is really cleverly disguised deep fried Polenta. Oh and the other one is when a customer phones in and asks you to perform a Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 hardware migration. 

So you can imagine the double gag reflex induced when we got a call asking for no less than TWO Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 migrations. One in London, the other in..... Scotland.

Lets just stop to think about what this means for a minute. Your customer is entrusting the entire digital assets of not one but two remote offices - all to you. SBS setups are traditionally single domain, so you can’t really take them down without causing some sort of office disruption. You can already sense the lynch mob of impatient staff looking over your shoulder, asking ’are we there yet?’. You are not that keen on going to Scotland to perform this risky stunt either. You recall the movie ’Braveheart’.

What do you do? You can’t chicken out - your customer needs you. You can’t fail - you need your customer (and your internal organs). It’s a bit like meeting the girl of your dreams, and after it’s been going amazingly well for 6 months, she asks you to repair the priceless super fragile 1930’s mother of perl necklace that her late ’ma entrusted to her. She reminds you it’s irreplaceable & emotionally sacred. This is absolute trust. This is absolute pressure.

Or as I like to think - ’A Polenta disaster waiting to happen’

Needless to say, on slogging through the reams of Microsoft TechNet ’best practice’ documentation - worst fears were confirmed. Migrating would be a horribly long, painful drawn out process. Install fresh copy of SBS on new server, next back up the old server up, finally restore onto the new server. Sound easy? Well - there is a checklist as long as the worlds longest Spaghetti (503 feet just in case you were interested) - detailing exactly at what time, what steps are required to put the server into what correct state for the backup and restore. And remember, while the backup

Now having worked as Technical Director for a web application vendor, for 7 special years, I can’t remember the number of times people used to ’get tough’ with us about the performance of our web application under load. The fact was, that with any web application, heavy load is always going to mean that some sort of ’special’ & ’Not-so-off-the-shelf’ configurations would be called for. And these special configurations would obviously cost time and money to develop and tailor to the customers requirements, and hence the customers disgust at discovering a painful side effect of success in Web 2.0 life.

This of course is a problem which curses any person running off the shelf web products, content management systems, shopping carts etc. Suddenly your site gets a little on the busy side, and your server turns to treacle. It’s natural to want to blame the server guys. And of course the server guys blame the software guys. Sound familiar?

And so we get a call from someone having (what we like to refer to as) ’success’ challenges with a shopping cart package called ’X-Cart’. Basically they found it slow. So slow, that for large periods of time, even viewing the homepage (forget buying) involved making tea. Lots of it. The server people say the servers fine. PHP on the server is fine. What is going on?

After a quick pop into the sickly server in question, we could see that the issues were a little to do with the Application, a little to the Server - but a LOT to do with how requests were being handled between the two. In short, we are looking at a car crash - in a traffic jam.

So we bench X-Cart up in the lab environment. s per usual, we wanted to make this a control test, which is basically load testing the application with absolutely no tweaking of the core services such as PHP & MySQL. We are testing it right off the shelf.  As expected, the ’off the shelf’ test of X-Cart didn’t impress.