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Portal Sizing
Chapter 4 Pre-Deployment Considerations 65
maximum number of concurrent sessions =
expected percent of users online * user base
To identify the size of the user base or pool of potential users for an enterprise
portal, here are some suggestions:
• Identify only users who are active. Do not include users who are, for example,
away on vacation, or on leave.
• Use a finite figure for user base. For an anonymous portal, estimate this
number conservatively.
• Study access logs.
• Identify the geographic locations of your user base.
• Remember what your business plan states regarding who your users are.
Average Time Between Page Requests
Average time between page requests is how often, on average, a user requests a page
from the Portal Server. Pages could be the initial login page to the portal, or a web
site or web pages accessed through the Portal Desktop. A page view is a single call
for a single page of information no matter how many items are contained on the
page.
Though web server logs record page requests, using the log to calculate the
average time between requests on a user basis is not feasible. To calculate the
average time between page requests, you would probably need a commercially
available statistics tool, such as the WebLoad performance testing tool. You can
then use this figure to determine the number of concurrent users.
Concurrent Users
A concurrent user is one connected to a running web browser process and
submitting requests to or receiving results of requests from Portal Server. The
maximum number of concurrent users is the highest possible number of concurrent
users within a predefined period of time.
NOTE Page requests more accurately measure web server traffic than
“hits.” Every time any file is requested from the web server counts
as a hit. A single page call can record many hits, as every item on the
page is registered. For example, a page containing 10 graphic files
records 11 “hits”—one for the HTML page itself and one for each of
the 10 graphic files. For this reason, page requests gives a more
accurate determination of web server traffic.