How do you determine the performance characteristics of the production environment?
When doing a performance test in some test environment we need to determine how the application under test performs in a disparate production environment. We predictively project the results onto the production environment. For this we need to know the characteristics of both the test environment and the production environment. The characteristics of the test environment are derived from the measurements taken from that environment. For obtaining the characteristics of the production environment we use benchmarks such as CINT2006 for CPU-speeds. We also have started to use our own benchmark. Either we look up the values of CPU-speed for the CPUs of test and production in the tables of Specmark.org or we run the benchmark ourselves in both environments.