Your website is a little slow - so what? Well, it is probably costing you money. I have been researching published facts about web performance because we are always trying to understand our industry better. This post should help you realize that improving your web application performance can directly impact your bottom line by 10% or more. Don't believe me? Read on...

There are some excellent stats gathered about performance testing at this resource site.

I especially like the one that states 5 second response time is the cutoff point for the business doing well. If the app takes longer than 5 sec to respond, the company employees start to get frustrated. It makes sense to me that productivity will go down. That not only leads to unhappy employees, it invariably leads to lost customers and lost profits.

For most developers, worrying about optimization when writing SQL queries is not an issue until performance becomes a problem with an application. Although SQL query optimization is important, it can be seen as a tedious process that some programmers fail to follow thoroughly. Some best practices can be observed during the development process that will help maximize performance for future application scalability.

Use SELECT Instead of Using SELECT *

Even with the most bandwidth possibly available, an inefficient content delivery design can bring a Web 2.0 application to its knees. Nothing turns off potential users like a page that loads too slowly. This is a critical concern when designing any application, but it is a requirement that must be carefully balanced against the need to provide a content rich environment. The two goals are often opposed, but with careful design, both requirements can be successfully met.

For large companies, load balancing is an important feature to use to increase performance. Large companies with the available resources will use web farms. Web farms give your applications the ability to use multiple servers for resources more commonly known as pooling resources. Load balancing helps distribute user requests through a dispatch application that redirects to the different web farm servers.

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 do not inherently support load balancing out of the box like most information technology experts might think. They have intrinsic tools that allow for scalability and load balancing, however, they do not have the defined load balancing functions that are commonly known among network administrators. Instead, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 comes with some tools to help with scalability and performance for your enterprise organization.

Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS)