title: Best practices and literature for web application load testing
body: <p>As a web developer I've been asked (a couple of times in my career) about the performance of sites that we've built. 
  Sometimes you'll get semi-vague questions like "will the site continue perform well, even during product launch week?", "can the site handle a <em>million</em> users?", and even "<em>how is the site doing?</em>"</p>
  
  <p>Of course, these questions are very legitimate, and I have always tried to answer these questions to the best of my ability, using a combination of </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>historic data (google analytics / IIS logs)</li>
  <li>web load test tools </li>
  <li>server performance counters   </li>
  <li>experience </li>
  <li>gut feeling</li>
  <li>common sense </li>
  <li>a little help from our sysadmins</li>
  <li>my personal understanding of the software architecture in question</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I have usually been able to come up with reasonable answers to these questions.
  However, web app performance can be influenced by many things (database dependencies, caching strategies, concurrency issues, etcetera, user behaviour).</p>
  
  <p>I'm a programmer and not a statician, and my approach to this problem has always felt deeply <em>unscientific</em>. So I did a little more research... and all of my google results seem to focus on tools and features and metrics (and MORE metrics) when I am really looking for a way <em>to make sense of these things</em>. </p>
  
  <p><strong>The question:</strong>
  What are some good resources (books?) to read on the best practices for a developer to read on the subject of web load testing, that will help me answer these types of questions?</p>